Everything Will Be All Right

Five

In Zoe’s memory, Fiona first came to their school the day they did air pressure. At junior school they only did science in an occasional desultory way, when their excitable Welsh teacher was in the mood for it. Drawing autumn leaves or testing milk and vinegar with litmus paper was a glamorous respite from the routines of English comprehension and maths.

On this particular day (they were Junior Three, so Zoe was ten years old), he crowded the whole class into the staff room, which was enough of an adventure in itself; this was normally a forbidden sanctum whose threshold they were not allowed to cross. The children were usually allowed in here only if they had fainted or been sick and were waiting, perhaps wrapped in the old blue cellular blanket, to be collected by a parent. It was always consoling to be reminded that this snug refuge was only a step away from the rough struggle of the echoing lofty classrooms, with their gothic windows too high to look out from. The staff room was homey, with a gas fire and armchairs and crocheted cushion covers smelling of mothballs; there was a tray with a teapot and knitted cosy, jars of coffee and sugar, and a biscuit barrel with a wicker handle. The teachers’ coats were hung up on hooks in one corner, proving that they really did sometimes go home and have real lives elsewhere. Zoe was prone to a little rush of worship at the thought of her teachers’ private lives. She was really very happy at that school.

Beside the fire was a gas ring where the teachers boiled their kettle. Mr. Lloyd had brought in from home an empty metal paraffin can with a screw lid. He impressed upon them, first, that they were not to touch anything — anything — in the staff room; second, that this experiment was much too dangerous for them ever to try for themselves; and, third, that it would have been even more dangerous if he hadn’t scrupulously washed out every trace of paraffin before he started. Then he put the empty can with its lid unscrewed onto the gas ring and began to heat it.

It was of course the aura of danger that the children loved with this teacher. This was true even when they weren’t doing science, even when they were writing out, say, five sentences with speech marks at the beginning, five sentences with speech marks at the end, and five with speech marks in the middle; or multiplying nineteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and eightpence ha’penny by 7, 9, and 11. He was a short, springy, vital man with a lock of shining black hair that flopped forward and had to be tossed back out of his eyes, a passionate Baptist who explained to them as if it were a truth that brooked no argument the flawed logic of the Roman Catholic celebration of Christ’s suffering. He cultivated a volatile and histrionic relationship with his classes, irresistible to certain of the girls and the cleverer boys. It did not occur to Zoe at the time to wonder how those other boys felt about him, the ones whose failures were the necessary grist to his teaching performances, those whose ears he twisted or whose legs he slapped across the back of the knee.

— What’s inside this can? he asked them, while it was heating.

Surely that was easy.

There was a whole ritual performance attached in Mr. Lloyd’s class to the answering of questions. If you knew the answer — or, riskily, if you didn’t but thought he wouldn’t pick on you — you thrust your arm up and called out “Sir! sir!” urgently, eagerly. Mr. Lloyd meanwhile would fasten on one of the children, usually one of the boys who didn’t know the answer, and persist in trying to elicit it from him. Those who knew, or were pretending they knew and had probably by now forgotten that they didn’t, would carry on calling out, pumping their arms in the air, and — not in the staff room obviously, but if they were in their normal classroom — actually climbing onto their chairs and jumping up and down on them, in a crescendo of desperate appeal. This wasn’t an occasional performance but repeated every day, usually over times tables or spellings. Mr. Lloyd would eventually turn in disgust from the ignoramus he was persecuting and ask one of the panting, desperately certain ones; sometimes it would turn out that he or she had no idea of the answer either. Then the others who had subsided momentarily into a post-climactic lassitude would revive and start the chanting and pumping of fists in the air again.

— Sir! Sir!

But today no one, not even Zoe or Barbara Mole or Pamela Warren or Neil Ashley or David Tew, or any of the others who were usually to be counted on, could give the right answer.

— What’s inside this can? he said again, smiling at them, enjoying their perplexity.

Nothing, they were sure. He had turned it upside down; he had passed it around; they were sure it was empty.

— There’s something inside this can, he said. What is it?

The answer dawned slowly. You could see one or two hug the possibility to themselves, then look round cautiously to see if others were thinking the same thing, putting their hands tentatively halfway up.

Zoe saw where the new girl was sitting. She had been introduced to them that morning, and Zoe had felt the customary mixture of pity and initiated smugness at the thought of the tangled web of school codes and hierarchies that was bound to trip her up and expose her before she learned to fit in. Her name was Fiona Martin. That might be a point of vulnerability to begin with; the boys might call her Martin, with its humiliating implications of uncertain gender and a taint of maleness. She was also wearing a woolly homemade-looking top and skirt, very neat, in brown. Zoe had once worn a woolly skirt her Grandma Lil had knitted her, and Gary Lyons in words seared onto Zoe’s memory had asked if it didn’t “itch her fat arse.” She had refused ever to wear that skirt to school again.

What was striking however about Fiona Martin, while they were thinking about air in the staff room, was that she was not looking round to see what the others thought, nor was she frowning in the required perplexity, nor did she look anxious or defiant like one of the naughty or dull ones. She was composed and sat straight-backed with her legs crossed, watching Mr. Lloyd steadily, as if expectation of his explanation of the mystery was a quiet pleasure but nothing to make a fuss about. She was very pretty; Zoe had not taken that in adequately, earlier. That would make a difference to how she was treated. She had smooth olive-colored skin, features of a satisfying neatness that insults could not hang on, and fine straight black hair cut off in an unusual bob just above her shoulder (the fashionable way for girls to wear their hair that year was in two low-slung bunches). It ought to have been terrible, to be new, and yet Fiona Martin looked as if she wasn’t afraid.

— If I took all the furniture out, would this room be empty? Mr. Lloyd asked. He held out his cupped hands. Are my hands empty? What’s in my hands now?

They began to understand. There was air, air was everywhere; they waved their hands about in it with sudden consciousness. Paul Andrews, the clown, pretended to get a handful of it and drop it down someone’s back.

— Air, sir. It’s air.

— Lyons, what is it?

— It’s air, sir.

— And air is made up of molecules, like everything else, bouncing against one another and against other molecules. That’s called air pressure: the molecules of the air pressing on everything around them. We don’t feel it because we take it for granted. But we would certainly notice it if it wasn’t there. Watch this.

He explained to them about the molecules of air inside the can becoming farther and farther apart and moving faster and faster as they heated up. Then when the can was very hot he screwed on the lid, using the potholder the staff used for their kettle, and turned the gas off.

— As air cools, it contracts. The air pressure on the inside of the can weakens; it’s pressing less hard than ordinary air. The air outside the can is pressing with normal air pressure. The air outside is pressing in harder than the air inside is pressing out. Watch.

It worked very satisfactorily. Under pressure from something quite invisible and intangible, the solid-seeming metal container buckled and crumpled, giving out twanging, booming noises like protests. Zoe felt it as if it were happening in herself, that invasion and hollowness, that caving in, helpless and extravagant and pleasurable. Fiona Martin watched with a slight unperturbed curve of the lips, as if the exhibition only confirmed something she had long intuited. And the idea of the buckling container became a kind of shorthand sign for Zoe for years afterward, signifying that momentous first encounter with someone who is going to be important and be loved.

* * *

A large proportion of zoe’s efforts at that junior school were devoted to making herself as acceptably inconspicuous as possible. This wasn’t easy; she couldn’t help being determinedly opinionated, anymore than she could help her square pink face and thick light-brown bunches of hair and her sturdy arms and legs (she wasn’t really fat, she knew; Gary Lyons would call anyone fat who wasn’t lean as a knife, as he was). She looked like the Dutch girl in clogs and cap who stood with the Eskimo, the barefoot colored boy, and the little Indian squaw in the picture that hung over the entrance to their classroom, gazing adoringly up at a blond Jesus bringing together the children of the world.

One of the things that Zoe had to keep out of sight at school was her disdain for the present. Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgment. She flinched from the raw ugliness of modern things: bleak concrete shopping centers built up where the old streets of the city had been bombed, plastic teenager dolls, and Crimplene clothes. She bothered her mother for stories about the time when she lived with Grandma and Aunt Vera and her cousins in an old gray house on the estuary with no gas or electricity, where there was an orchard and a little stone room for storing the apples, sweet-tasting queer-shaped apples of a kind you couldn’t buy anywhere anymore. When they drove out once to look for the house, all they could find was a filthy carbon factory.

When she went on holiday to the Gower Peninsula with her parents and wound up the car windows going through Port Talbot, she stared straight ahead in shame: the naked innards of the steelworks stank and sprawled across the coastal plain. It was a horror to her, guiltily pushed away just out of reach of conscious thought, that anyone should have to live under those blighted hillsides where the trees were stunted and blackened; it made a shadow in the corner of all her pleasure in the sea and the beach and the cottage they rented, where she played out her games of past times, trailing about in long skirts, baking, washing herself in cold water, stitching elaborate layers of underclothes for her rag dolls (she wouldn’t use nylon lace or plastic buttons).

She couldn’t quite believe that if you pushed hard enough you wouldn’t be able to make the passage through to the past from the present. She read books where children managed this—A Traveller in Time and Tom’s Midnight Garden—and they fueled and sharpened her desire. Real people, astonishingly but unarguably, had once worn these clothes, handled these things; everything that was now saturated with mystery had once been casually used. If you touched them yourself, possessed them, put them on, might you not take on something of the superior substance and depth that the past had, in contrast to the shallow present? This active nostalgia and an elegiac sense that the best things were gone were Zoe’s first strong abstract emotions.

Her cult of the past translated itself into a quite passionate materialism. During this time, her last years at junior school and first years at secondary, there was a craze everywhere for Victoriana, for the old things that only a decade before everybody had been ripping out of their houses in disgust: old dressers, old brass fittings, old fireplaces. Now when Zoe’s parents bought their first house, a teetering, skinny, four-floor, eighteenth-century terrace house that they had to convert from grimy bedsits, her mother papered the lounge in imitation William Morris wallpaper and knocked out a 1930s tiled mantelpiece to expose the original deep recess behind. “Original” became a word of powerful magic. Junk shops were treasure troves, and Zoe and her mother drew together in their deep interest in buying things. Zoe started a collection: a little leather-covered inkwell that clicked open to reveal a glass bottle; a wooden trunk with cast-iron fittings, which Joyce found thrown out on a skip and which they stripped down together; a dove-gray Edwardian silk parasol with drawn-thread work around its rim, given to her for Christmas by her Aunt Ann. Zoe tried to do drawn-thread work herself; she made patchwork and tatted lace on a tiny old ivory shuttle.

She had a couple of friends at school who read the same books and were happy enough to dress up whenever they saw each other at weekends, to play Victorian governesses or ladies and maids. At first she dreamed, against all probability, that Fiona Martin might share her passion for the past. She looked for a sign, an exchange of glances when an extract from The Young Brontës was read out in class, an unnatural informedness with regard to dance programs or gophering irons. But as she grew accustomed to Fiona’s being at school and the sign didn’t come, she realized that she was even glad of it. Fiona wasn’t meant to yearn, as she did. It didn’t matter that Fiona didn’t dream about how things could be otherwise, because Zoe was the imaginer and Fiona was the thing itself: the still point, the Princess.

* * *

Zoe soon understood that one reason fiona hadn’t seemed afraid of coming to a new school was because she had had so many more terrible things to practice being brave on. Her cousin, Jackie Potter, was already in their same class, so the word quickly got around — bred out of the little closed circles of murmuring girls with their arms hung around one another’s necks in the playground, faces long with portent or indignation — that Fiona’s parents were divorced. “Divorced” in those days stood for something lurid, only half comprehended, shaming. Zoe wished she hadn’t heard and refused to tell anyone else, although she was supposed to; she had been in trouble for this before, when messages came down the line with the tag, “Pass it on.” She feared and hated those closed circles of girls and all the high dramas they generated out of their intimate heat: once-favored ones excluded and weeping, once-excluded ones reinstated and brilliant with relief, lashing out in turn to prove themselves.

Because she was pretty and well liked, Fiona with her divorced parents could have queened it, ostentatiously afflicted, her protectors scowling about them to forestall any intrusion or insensitivity. Instead, when once the divorce was awkwardly produced in conversation, her smile was quite steady, and her perfectly light and polite tone deflected any further inquiry.

— Yes, they are, she said. But it’s all right. It was all for the best.

The girls’ toilets were in a sort of shed at the end of the playground; it was customary for five or six girls to share one dank cramped cubicle, shuffling round to wee and wipe themselves on the hard paper in turn. Fiona sometimes stood in with Zoe and Barbara and Pam and sometimes in Jackie Potter’s cubicle across the way; only she could have moved effortlessly across the gulf dividing these two extremes of playground society without causing offense. Jackie had a memorable woman’s face, black-rimmed big eyes, and mobile mouth. She claimed a knowledge of the body and its forbidden and savory effects that the nice girls in the other cubicles couldn’t but respond to with fascination as well as disgust. Once, for example, she had a “suppurating sore” on her belly, which girls queued up to see (Zoe, Pam, and Barbara did not want to, nor were they invited, although the idea of the suppurating probably preoccupied them all the more for remaining nonspecific).

Jackie was supposed to be having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, who was fifteen (she was ten). In private with her friends, Zoe poured fierce scorn on this, claiming it was physically impossible, although her sense of the mechanics of sex was vague. There was something in Jackie’s stories she angrily resisted even while they worked powerfully on her imagination, conjuring an underworld of scuffles and shriekings and groping exchanges of intimacies, out on the streets as the light faded, slipped from the leash of parental scrutiny. The boyfriend’s pronouncements on male need, passed relishingly on by Jackie, seemed even savage: apparently he liked girls “with a bit of meat on them.” Zoe was horrified to think what for: she pictured him sinking his teeth into a leg or a neck as part of some sexual process.

And somehow, mysteriously, Fiona was part of all this, although she gave none of it away; her name was mixed up with boys’ names in Jackie’s account of the arcane negotiations that always sounded more like a kind of war than “love.” “Martin loves Diana.” “Lester says he loves Fiona more than he loves Sandra.” Fiona didn’t even blush. “So he says”—she laughed lightly — or, “I don’t think so.” And yet she must have been there, she must have come out on the street with the others in order to be “loved.” You could tell from the way Jackie pressed her, too, that she was not marginal to these transactions, that Jackie gained status and negotiating power through being Fiona’s cousin. Yet it was impossible for Zoe to imagine Fiona of her own volition choosing to go down on the street and be snatched at and fought over. She had a way of moving through arrangements as if they were always other people’s, so that they seemed to leave no trace on her.

Already, other girls in Jackie’s crowd looked marked and set apart from the good children. Their skin was sallow and bruised easily, their hair was lank; some had gold hoops in their ears, and their clothes were skimpy hand-me-downs, stained and unironed. It wasn’t entirely unattractive, this marked and used look; it was certainly to be preferred to looking like the children from the Homes, who were at the bottom of the playground hierarchy, neat always, but with giveaway chopped-off haircuts, clothes all tainted with the same sad charitable grayness, and smelling sometimes of wee (Jackie Potter only smelled of strong perfume). Fiona’s appearance, however, gave nothing away. She could have been one of the girls who went riding and had ballet lessons, for all you could tell. She didn’t speak with a broad local accent, but Gary Lyons couldn’t tease her for sounding “posh,” either. What stood out was something quietly adult in her demeanor and in how she was dressed: clean white sweaters and tartan skirts, white lace tights and black patent shoes with straps across.

* * *

Fiona was very willing to be zoe’s friend; the only difficulty was that she was willing to be everybody’s. Zoe was jealous and persistent; she grabbed Fiona by the arm in a quick settling gesture of claim and possession whenever they had to make pairs for games or Music and Movement; she asked Mr. Lloyd if she could move to Fiona’s table, pretending she was sick of Paul Andrews banging down the desk lid on her head. She would have liked to help Fiona with her work; she had done this for other friends. But although Fiona didn’t have the usual outward signs of cleverness — the clumsy mix of awkwardness and smugness — she turned out, to Zoe’s surprise, to be as quick and clever at most things as Zoe herself (only she didn’t get the stars that Zoe got for her stories; Mr. Lloyd was a fan of Zoe’s descriptive passages). She was invited to become part of “grub days,” when Zoe’s gang took turns bringing in something to eat in the playground: sultanas, or salt, or stock cube, wrapped in a twist of paper tissue. Fiona brought in hundreds and thousands; they all wet their fingers and dipped in. At home Zoe pestered her mother until she bought the same tiny candies at the supermarket, which Zoe then licked up alone in ritual imitation.

There was eventually some understanding in the class that she and Fiona belonged together, though it was never enough for Zoe, because Fiona wouldn’t unbend from her evenhandedness. She was a serious and sympathetic listener, but she didn’t volunteer needs or prejudices of her own. She would gracefully detach from Zoe’s group to join in some game of Please Jack May We Cross the Water? or I Wrote a Letter to My Love that had swollen to fill the whole space of the concrete playground between its high walls. Zoe and her friends kept aloof from these games. Fiona was quietly expert in all the variants, the forfeits, the different dipping-outs; she sang out confidently, “Jack says anyone with blue” or skipped round the outside of the ring, giving no sign when she let fall the handkerchief behind some chosen person’s back.

She came to Zoe’s house to play. Zoe, who had longed to reveal her whole real life to her friend, was aware of herself in a rush of showing off, talking in a silly artificial voice to Daniel, rolling in the goatskin rug in the lounge that left her covered in hairs, rudely stealing biscuits Joyce would have given to her anyway, playing all her piano pieces over badly and much too fast. She was hardly able to take in that this was the real Fiona, transplanted disconcertingly into the too-familiar spaces. They adored the kitten; Fiona was politely interested in Zoe’s treasures, her inkwell and her white china horses and the beaded pincushion with “BABY” on it. Then they were at a loss for what to do. Zoe simply didn’t know what Fiona liked.

Shyly she suggested the dressing-up box, offering Fiona the best thing, which she usually took for herself: Nana Deare’s wedding dress, full-length in cream silk with its dry stretchy stickiness under the fingers, sewn across all round the skirt with tiny tucks, buttoning with pearl buttons up the inside arm and down the back. She helped Fiona put it on; they fastened some of the surplus skirt up out of the way with an elastic Brownie belt round the waist. Zoe pinned up Fiona’s hair behind a velvet Alice band and fixed white clip-on earrings on her ears; they went to look in the full-length mirror in Joyce’s room. Even Fiona seemed moved. She stopped very still at the sight of herself and allowed Zoe to powder her face from Joyce’s compact.

— Pretend you’re a pirate’s moll, said Zoe. (She had watched a series about eighteenth-century criminals on television at Grandma Lil’s and found its glamorous lawlessness very exciting.) The bunk beds are the ship, the top one is the deck and the underneath one is the cabin where we eat and sleep.

— What’s a moll? agreed Fiona, willingly.

— You’re his girlfriend, and all the respectable people disapprove of you, but really you’re the one who truly loves him.

Absorbedly, they played this game for hours and revived it sometimes afterward when Fiona came again to tea. Although its narratives were somewhat repetitious — crisis and injury and nursing back to health, Fiona calm and capable and reassuring, Zoe, when she wasn’t strutting on the upper deck, desperate and terminal with a lot of groaning and fainting and feverish tossing about — its satisfactions never seemed to pall.

* * *

Momentously, then, zoe was asked to tea with fiona. they walked quietly to Fiona’s home together after school, oppressed with awareness of the advance in their intimacy. Fiona turned in at the gate of one of the big shabby stuccoed houses fronting onto the heath, a higgledy-piggledy clutch of bells beside the door signifying flats and bedsits. Fiona had her own door key and didn’t seem sure whether her mother would be there or not (there had never been a day when Joyce wasn’t waiting at home for Zoe, with milk and cake or biscuits). Inside, when the front door banged shut on its heavy hinge behind them, Zoe was for a few moments afraid of the strangeness of the cold echoing stairwell, its brown lino and bare bulb and brown-stained old wallpaper, smelling of stale dinners and alien sour toilets.

— We have to hurry, said Fiona. The light switch goes off by itself.

Fiona’s mother loomed above them over the banisters before they reached the second floor in their scramble; she pressed the light on again.

— Greetings, my darlings, she said. I haff put ze kettle on for tea. (She often put on a foreign accent when she was in her playful mood.)

Zoe thought Fiona looked disappointed to see her, although this might have only been because there wasn’t much space in the tiny two-roomed flat; mother and daughter shared a poky bedroom whose window stared out at the blank side of the next door house. The kitchenette was no more than an alcove behind a curtain printed gaily with wine bottles and bits of leafy trellis and lemons (Fiona’s mother called the flat a maisonette, too, and Zoe a brunette: forever afterward Zoe associated these diminutives with her). The flat was clean, though, and optimistically prettified with plants and ornaments: a china bell in the shape of a lady in a crinoline, a painting of a kitten in a bamboo frame, fluffy nylon rugs in pastel colors. Zoe couldn’t repress her furtive guilty judgment against these choices; she couldn’t help feeling that Fiona must admire the superior good taste in her own home.

Fiona’s mother looked like her, with a heart-shaped face, bright liquid eyes, and precise features like a neat appealing animal. She had the same black hair and olive skin, except that the hair was permed, not sleek, and her skin was powdered and pouchy. Like Fiona she was daintily decisive in all her gestures, tying on a frilled pinny to get ready their beans on toast (the kind of pinny Joyce, who wore a striped butcher’s apron, said was only good for playing at house); repairing her lipstick with a skeptical glance in the mirror; unclasping her handbag to fish out her cigarettes, which she kept in a metal holder with her name — Jean — engraved on it in flowery letters (“given me by an old boyfriend,” she smiled, squinting through smoke). She reproached herself for smoking—“Horrible habit! Bad girl!”—slapping the back of her own ringed hand.

— I’m glad, she said, that Fiona’s made a nice friend. Someone to get her into the right crowd at school.

When Jean squeezed Zoe she sank into sweetish softness spiked with jewelry and hard buttons and long nails, smelling of cigarettes and flowery perfume, and something else fruity and rich and rotten, which Zoe later learned to recognize as drink: gin and vermouth, or brandy. A little bar was installed across one corner of the sitting room, with shelves and a counter made from colored glass, paper cocktail umbrellas, a jar of maraschino cherries, and a chrome cocktail shaker. Jean talked to the girls about her various “boyfriends” (Fiona said some of them were quite nice and some were horrors) and about the staff at Brights Hotel, where she worked. “That barman’s a right little so-and-so. Quel charmer! Now Cook and me, Cook and me don’t get along. She’s a dirty you-know-what and can’t forgive anyone who’s younger and gets out more than she does.” (For a long time Zoe imagined Jean at Brights dressed up smartly and acting in some kind of hostesslike role, receiving guests: she only had a very vague idea of what went on in hotels. But when once she and Fiona had to ask to speak to Jean at work because Fiona had lost her key, she was wearing a housecoat and rubber gloves and pushing a cleaning trolley between the bedrooms. This was only Zoe’s mistake; there had been no pretense on Jean’s part, nor was there any embarrassment over their finding her there.)

Fiona showed Zoe her satiny nightdress case, and her Tressie doll, whose hair wound in and out of her head, and a miniature brass lampstand with a glass shade; when you pulled a chain like a light switch it brought down a tray with three tiny bottles of very dark brown scent.

— My daddy gave it me. They used to be nice. Only I didn’t use them and they’ve got strong.

— It’s really sweet, said Zoe (which was not a word she used under normal circumstances).

— If you’re divorced, she said warily, do you see your daddy often?

— It just depends. Fiona shrugged. He has to travel about a lot, for his work.

— That’s a shame for you. I suppose he’s nice, is he?

— He is quite nice, said Fiona. But I’m used to it.

— Why don’t you girls go outside and run around before it’s dark? said Jean, who was doing her nails in a cloud of nail varnish remover.

— Shall we? asked Fiona. We could go in the Dumps.

Zoe was surprised; it looked dark enough already, outside the window. She would not have been allowed to go out at home; she felt a flicker of fear, as if she shared for a moment in an adult’s apprehension of herself not properly taken care of, tumbling about alone, falling into the so-much-warned-about gap left open by adult neglect.

— Let’s, she said.

It wasn’t as dark outside as it looked from indoors. The light was only just beginning to drain away out of a sky stacked up with golden clouds, against which the stubby thorn trees of the heath stood in black fairy-tale outline. Opposite the house, only twenty yards back from the edge of the road, there was a long untidy hollow, said to be some kind of bomb crater, although Nana Deare thought she could remember it from before the war. The top surface of the heath was kept mown all summer; when the classes from school came up here at playtime on fine days they built huge child-sized nests out of the heaps of cut grass. But the Dumps were impossibly crooked and steep-sided and so were allowed to grow wild, with long grasses and flowers and clumps of bushes. A meandering little dust path wound through the length of them, about a quarter of a mile at most.

Zoe and Fiona wandered hand in hand, and Zoe showed Fiona that you could eat the “bread and butter” berries off the hawthorns. They had hopping races up the path, elbowing each other off, holding their spare ankles up in their hands behind; they played at paralyzing each other’s fingers, stroking wrists with a special circular technique. They had the Dumps pretty much to themselves, only meeting a couple of dog-walkers and one of the usual old tramps who haunted the place. A slanting chilly late light glided onto the heath from behind a cloud and smothered the Dumps in shadow. The girls knew it would be dark next. Then there was an eruption of noise some way off: calling, a snapping of branches, scuffling, yelps of laughter.

— Oh, hell, Fiona said, it’s probably that lot.

It was the first time Zoe had ever heard her use bad language. (Jean said “sugar” and “scuse my French.”)

— What lot?

— You know: Lester and Jackie and that.

Zoe started to worry; she could imagine how “that lot” might be delighted to find one of the conforming and obedient children from school exposed out here where their power was unchecked.

— Are they allowed to play out in the Dumps?

— What do you think? Fiona frowned. No one bothers where they are.

— Let’s go back to your house then.

— There’s no time. But there’s a den; we could hide. Probably it’s so dark they won’t see us.

There must have been nights, Zoe realized, when Fiona came out to play with these others in the Dumps voluntarily and was part of the whooping and yelling and breaking of trees. For now, though, Fiona pulled Zoe after her into a thicket of bushes with a secret space inside, a dusty mud floor littered with a few dirty sweet wrappers. Perhaps she decided to hide partly because Zoe was a liability and it was inconvenient to be found with her. They crouched down on their haunches, holding on to each other for balance, smelling the day’s heat baked into splintery wood, pungent leaves, and dog dirt. They felt each other’s breathing; Zoe was aware of Fiona’s soft skin and her aura of talcum powder and clean washing and found under her fingers the fine gold chain Fiona wore with a cross around her neck. They shook with silent giggling, half nervous, half real fun.

It wasn’t Jackie and Lester and “that lot” after all; the boys and girls who came racing, pounding, leaping through the Dumps in the long last shadows of the day were strangers. The thudding of their feet and the blare of their yelling hung there for moments after they’d passed through; one boy shouted out the word “fuck” and something worse, and the terrible names used so flauntingly tore a vivid gash in the air. She and Fiona clung together, laughing into each other’s shoulders. Zoe was completely happy. Instead of imagining life’s possible intensity, she was inside it; it filled her.

As the girls crossed the road on their way back to Fiona’s house, Zoe’s father drew up in his car. He looked surprised to see her out at that time; and in truth when she looked around her through his eyes she saw that it was effectively by any adult standards dark.

— We’ve been in the Dumps, she called out ringingly, to forestall any idea of her having been put upon or taken advantage of. We’ve been having a super time.

Ray peered at them worriedly.

— You should have crossed on the zebra, he said.

— Oh, it’s all right, said Fiona. My mum lets me.

— Well, I’m not so sure. The cars come round that corner very fast. And it’s dark.

Zoe knew he wouldn’t be able to sustain the burden of responsible parental anxiety for very long; her favorite tease of him was for his laziness. After all, nothing had happened, there had been no accident, the girls were safe. He might not even mention to her mother that they had been out on the heath alone at night, because he got irritated with how she fussed and worried over her children. When he was a boy, he said, he came and went as he wanted, as long as he turned up with clean hands for meals. Fiona walked neatly backward up the path away from them, opening and shutting her fingers in a little coded farewell.

— I don’t need to go inside to thank the mother, do I? Ray asked Zoe.

She snuggled up against the sweet tobacco smell of the top pocket of his corduroy jacket.

— I told Fiona to say thank you. And her mummy doesn’t even have to come to the door. Fiona has her own key, on a string round her neck.

He was safety, and rescue, and she was very glad of him; but she didn’t need him to know anything about the dazzle of the places she’d been without him.

* * *

Grandma lil died. she had had for years a swollen mole on her temple, which her daughters had urged her to show to the doctor; one afternoon it burst and released a blood clot into her brain. She came home from work at the cake shop with a severe headache; Martin asked the neighbors in the flat upstairs to telephone for an ambulance when she began vomiting and passing out. By the time Joyce and Ann arrived at the hospital, she was in a coma and the nurses sent them home, telling them to call first thing in the morning.

Joyce went out early to the telephone box, which was about a hundred yards down the street, against the long high red-brick wall of a small factory that made brake linings. This was a street of handsome Georgian houses in Kingsmile, but at a time when such streets were only just beginning to be bought up and decorated and made fashionable. Most of the houses were still multifamily, some of them with ancient layers of flaking paint and dirty windows hung with rags of lace curtain. When Joyce had made her call, she came home and sat down at the breakfast table without taking off her mac or untying her scarf. Daniel noisily poured himself cereal. She told them how, while she waited to be put through to the ward, a fire had broken out in a house opposite to the telephone box.

— There were real flames leaping up out of the windows of the first floor, and billowing smoke. And there were people waving for help at the windows of the floor above. I thought that really I should use the telephone to call the fire brigade, but while I was thinking that I got through to the ward and the Sister told me that Mum died this morning. And then two fire engines rolled up and firemen got out and put ladders up to the windows and carried the people down over their shoulders.

She looked with puzzlement at Ray.

— Did I really see that? Or was I just having a hallucination?

He shrugged helplessly.

— Do you want me to go and look?

— No, not really. I don’t really care.

All of them felt the painful strangeness of Joyce sitting motionless at the breakfast table in her outdoor things, with her bag on her lap, the familiar smart little bag shaped like a segment of orange, whose leather top fastened over with a clasp. Ordinarily she would be standing in her apron at the cooker or at the sink, busy supplying them with tea and toast and (in Ray’s case) bacon and eggs. Grief came over Zoe in the form of a monstrous embarrassment, so inhibiting that her limbs felt wooden and her tongue wouldn’t move properly. She had to hold in her mouth a little square of soggy toast that she couldn’t swallow.

— Grandma’s dead, Grandma’s dead, hooray, sang Daniel just under his breath, shoveling in spoonfuls of crispies. (He was only eight.)

— Don’t worry about him, said Joyce quickly, before Ray felt obliged to be stern. He’s just upset and doesn’t know what to say.

This gave Ray his pretext for transferring his irritation to Joyce, angry with her because he was so sorry she was hurt.

— He gets away with his sheer insensitivity and rudeness as usual.

Joyce looked at Ray as if she was seeing him from far off.

The children didn’t go to school. They spent the rest of the day at Zoe’s Aunt Ann’s; she had married a man in import and export and lived in an expensive flat in Hilltop with baby cousins that Zoe loved to play mother to. Cliff looked after them all while Joyce and Ann went to the hospital to get Lil’s things. Then they came back and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and crying and making arrangements, talking on the telephone to Aunt Vera, who called from the school, worrying about Martin, who had refused to get out of bed that morning. Joyce had brought him home from the hospital last night; she hadn’t wanted him to go back to the flat on his own.

— There’s nothing left for me to do then, is there? he had said when she woke him up to tell him the news.

Since he had failed to finish his doctorate, he had been spending his days inventing things and building remote-controlled toys for the children instead.

Zoe fussed busily over baby Sophie, changing her bootees and woolly coat, filling her pacifier with rose-hip syrup, piling cushions so she could sit tilted crazily but gamely to one side in her playpen heaped with educational toys. (Joyce and Ray made fun of all the fashionable baby paraphernalia Ann had bought.) She worked perhaps even tiresomely (she felt it herself), playing peep-bo and pat-a-cake, to get Sophie to crack into huge toothless smiles for her, as if the smiles might constitute some kind of proof against disaster. When Ann took Sophie to the clinic to be weighed and to pick up her orange juice, Zoe went along. Somehow her aunt’s unhappiness seemed more approachable than her own mother’s, which she dared not even directly contemplate, because the fabric of the world required her mother to be believing and hopeful.

— At least, she said to Ann (who wheeled the pram rather fast into the wind, so that Zoe had to skip along beside her to keep up), at least you’ve got it over with now. I mean, you won’t have to dread its happening anymore. (Zoe had used this consolation to support herself through visits to the dentist or the breakage of favorite ornaments.)

Ann turned on her a bleak blank face.

— But it’s not fair, she said in fury. Just when she was coming up to her retirement. It’s so unfair!

Zoe skipped on beside the pram in silence, trying not to come anywhere near the real thought of beloved Grandma Lil lost to her, wrestled somehow obscenely away out of existence. Underneath all the protective wadding of kindness and reassurance that it was the business of adults to surround you with, there lurked this lethal truth, dangerous as a naked wire that you might at any time put your hand on by mistake.

After Grandma Lil’s funeral the family went back to Ann’s, where the children were waiting for them with Uncle Cliff. Zoe imagined that a cold wind from wherever they had been was clinging to the adults’ somber clothes. The women’s faces were framed in wet head scarves; a jumble of umbrellas leaked across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. Aunt Vera said loudly to several people that when it was her turn she didn’t care if they buried her in a cardboard box. An Auntie Selina had come down from the North, shepherding a man Zoe supposed must be her husband; Selina looked so like Lil — small and stout with rich brown eyes and hair and a tilting nose — that it was obvious every time Joyce caught sight of her she felt the shock of a hopeless hope. Selina wasn’t quite like Lil, though; she stared more pointedly around her like a sharp brown bird, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t spill over with news, she didn’t have Lil’s way of subsiding comfortably into the corner of a chair, managing glass and fag together in one hand. The man with her sat very upright and still on Ann’s beige leather sofa, his feet in giant shoes placed tidily together on the shag carpet, his brown creased skin stretched tight on his long bony head, his white hair so fine and light it wafted in the movements of air when anyone passed. Ann held his hand and called him Gilly and seemed extravagantly moved to see him; Zoe crept close to listen to his voice. She had thought this way of talking was special to her Grandma Lil (Vera sounded something like it); now she was discovering a whole tribe of relatives who made the same warm kind sounds. Uncle Gilly didn’t say much; mostly he was shyly refusing the food Ann pressed upon him.

— Go on, Gilbert, you may as well take something, it’s all very nice, Selina encouraged, busy with her plate. He’s only put off if he thinks it’s foreign food. You’d think he’d have got used to it in New Zealand.

Gilbert said softly that he didn’t mind if he had a piece of ham.

— Gilbert was Lil’s little favorite when he was a baby, Selina said. (So perhaps he was not her husband.) Isn’t that right, Vera? He used to call her Nolly. When she was in service and coming home on her day off, Mam would stand him on a chair at the window in the front room to look out for her, and he would start calling out “Nolly, Nolly,” before she even turned the corner of the street. You could put the kettle on when you heard him. She sewed him a little pageboy outfit to wear at her wedding. D’you remember that, Gilbert? D’you remember being a page boy?

— No, said Gilbert, smiling apologetically, shaking his head so that his white hair floated, starting to cut his ham into neat small pieces.

* * *

Zoe and fiona went to different secondary schools. zoe, along with Barbara and Pam and Neil Ashley and David Tew and a couple of others, sat the examination for free places to the Direct Grant schools. This little gang of clever ones had been marked apart from the rest of the junior school class almost since anyone could remember, given extra bits of work and spoken to differently. They carried the teachers’ aspirations, fulfilled their longings for tests and triumphs. The other children — Gary Lyons, Paul Andrews, June Fitch — were threatened that they would “end up at” Langham Road, which was the local comprehensive school, “if they carried on the way they were” (and they did indeed end up there, probably regardless of whether they had carried on or not).

It was never seriously suggested that Fiona might sit the examination and get a free place too. Everyone knew, Joyce said at home, that even the free places could be expensive enough once you had paid for the uniform, books, hockey boots, and tennis rackets. Children from poor “backgrounds” would find it difficult to “keep up” with the others (“background” was the euphemism then, conjuring an image of the tragic individual spotlighted against murky, indistinct tenements and slums). Fiona smiled and shrugged and said she didn’t fancy it, as if she put rather a low value on anything the Direct Grant schools could have to teach her, and saw alternative and more intriguing initiations ahead at Langham Road. Their separation seemed to Zoe a fitting and even a poetic thing; it kept her feelings for Fiona twisting poignantly in her heart. She thought of Amery-James, the all-girls school where she duly got her free place, as somehow belonging in her world of the subtle past, and Langham Road as modern and brash and present. At this threshold she felt as if she were submitting to a sacrificial destiny. Zoe’s mother and her Aunt Ann had also been to Amery-James, and her Great-aunt Vera had taught there for half a lifetime (she retired the year before Zoe started). She was taking up a place sanctified by tradition. It helped that the school was in an old eighteenth-century house with an oak staircase and stone-flagged floors, and that they had to buy her uniform in an old-fashioned department store on Clore Hill, where bills and payment and change were whisked around a system of pneumatic pipes to and from a glassed-in counting office. (The store was so expensive they couldn’t get everything they had meant to, and Joyce had to buy some of it later from the secondhand cupboard at the school.)

Within a couple of weeks of beginning at Amery-James, Zoe felt differently. The rituals that were soothing to read about in books were irksome and depressing to live inside. Days were beset with pitfalls and anxieties: Had you remembered to hand in your maths homework on the right morning? Had your mother remembered to sew your name tape in your knickers in case there was a spot check? Had you returned your library books and brought in your science overall and your cakes for the cake sale for the Form Charity? Joyce found for Zoe a green mac that was not quite the green mac sanctioned by the uniform list. The teachers would pull her humiliatingly out of the crocodile of girls on their way to the sports field to lecture her on how it was unacceptable. She had to visit the secondhand cupboard again and buy a mac of the right kind.

Certain teachers, especially the older ones — Miss Webb, Miss Anstruther, Miss Langley — cultivated a game it was dangerous to become involved with, in which a brutal unsheathed cruelty (personal insults, contempt, a lashing loss of temper, shouting) would alternate with rewards, flashes of comradely inclusiveness, a calculated letting down of guards. The game’s brutality was sanctioned by the brutality of intellectual competition in the world outside, which was after all the raison d’être of the school. The physics teacher brought their marked homework into the classroom in three piles: good, acceptable, and unacceptable. The unacceptable pile wasn’t only of work done carelessly or incompletely; some of the girls had tried hard but simply not understood. The sheer burden of work seemed crushing. Under the school’s discipline Zoe learned French and Latin effectively (which no one seemed to do at Langham Road) and struggled with the most advanced Nuffield science teaching. Even though she liked English and her English teacher, the books she read there (George Eliot, Kipling, Robert Frost, Hopkins) were so contaminated for her by the place that she was not able to touch them again for years afterward. Every evening after school there were two or three hours of homework. In the lunch break, faced with an afternoon of maths and double Latin, Zoe’s heart would quail. It could not be endurable; surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up home time and the walk to the bus, which waited in a somnolent lull for twenty minutes on the suburban corner before it turned around for its return journey into town. Here at last was repose; in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets, she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.

In assembly and at commemoration services, the girls were addressed as if they were part of some ennobling crusade on behalf of enlightenment. Zoe was shocked to find herself bitterly and implacably opposed to the very principle of the place. She wasn’t much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness: unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, skeptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls. One of the fiercest of the teachers, Miss Webb, with frozen pale blue eyes and white hair wound in a plait around her head, took passionately against her.

— I see Zoe Deare is wearing her usual charming scowl, she would say, enlisting the rest of the class on her side in a spatter of giggles and exchanged gleams of treacherous amusement. Do you have a pain, Zoe?

Zoe was absentminded, hopeless at remembering all those little details of preparation that could ensure an uneventful life at Amery-James. One day she had been supposed to bring a board and a plastic bag into Miss Webb’s geography class, where they were going to make clay models of a shadoof, an ancient Egyptian irrigation system. Miss Webb boiled over into a torrent of righteous chastisement when Zoe turned out to be the only one who had forgotten. She actually took her by the shoulders and backed her across the classroom, shaking her so that her hair bunches flew and berating her in panting breathy bursts. The class drank up the spectacle in hot-faced silence.

— Little sour-faced miss … lazy, sloppy, sulky attitude … your sort of girls don’t get anywhere in a school like this. Don’t think I don’t know your type!

— I don’t even want to! shouted Zoe in bewilderment. I don’t even like this school!

— And this school doesn’t like you very much, either!

After this episode, Ray and Joyce went to see the headmistress, and Zoe was taken out of Miss Webb’s class.

Later, much later, Zoe was able to appreciate that the lives of some of these teachers must have been pioneering in their dedication to women’s education. Some of them had no doubt sacrificed married life and family in order to keep their independence and pursue their careers; probably some of them, their names in gold up on the honors board in the hall, had been to university at a time when women were not even awarded degrees. Zoe’s own Great-aunt Vera, when she was at Amery-James, had been by all accounts (including her own) one of the fierce and arbitrary teachers, and yet Zoe liked her. She never quite found a way to explain to her great-aunt that she and Amery-James had found themselves incompatible. Vera had been so proud when she got her free place and had bought her the black leather briefcase she at first eagerly filled with books. With twinges of guilt, Zoe allowed her to think that she had become one of those girls who romped and cheered and belonged. It was a revelation anyway, when her aunt talked, to hear the teachers referred to by their first names: Jennie Anstruther, Ruth Marsh (the English teacher Zoe liked), Beth Webb. Behind their school shapes they sounded suddenly girlish and tentative and incomplete. She never told Aunt Vera about her quarrel with Miss Webb. At least she could safely report her marks, which were always rather surprisingly good, considering how her teachers despaired of her.

Zoe’s family moved again at the end of her first year, this time to a tall Hilltop terraced house that had been a girl students’ residence, so that it had gas rings in every room and a rope fire escape wound on a red-painted reel in a bathroom with five sinks. (Joyce dedicated herself energetically, indefatigably, to her vision of its transformation; she made it beautiful.) From the new house it was only a fifteen minute walk to Fiona’s; she and Zoe made lingering transitions between their homes, looking together in all the shop windows on Clore Hill at things they planned to save for: felt pens, autograph books, sewing sets (Zoe), those electric lights filled with slowly moving blobs of different-colored oils (Fiona). They bought licorice and Parma Violets in the sweet shop.

Fiona listened to Zoe’s tales of Miss Webb.

— I don’t know how she’d get on at our school, she said. The boys are terrible for mucking about.

— Are they? asked Zoe, with a voluptuous inner shudder. What do they do? What do they do exactly?

She longed for mucking about. She even thought tenderly of Paul Andrews and his banging desk lids.

— Nicking pencil cases and chucking them around, said Fiona. Or flicking stuff, chewed-up lumps of paper and things. The latest is trying to set fire to their haversacks. It’s pretty boring.

To Zoe, whose lessons mostly passed in a subdued silence, this sounded as exciting as a carnival.

* * *

Zoe, who had been such an easy child, became moody and distant at home. Joyce found in her bedroom lugubrious messages she had written to herself for the first day of the holiday. “Appreciate to the full this wonderful day of freedom. How lucky you are. Six whole weeks! Don’t waste this precious time.” From Ray’s vantage point in his new first floor studio, spacious and full of good light, he could see his green-clad daughter plod into view at half past four every afternoon, weighed down with her briefcase, snuffed under her horrible hat. He mourned the bossy bouncing child she had been, full of schemes and passions. Joyce and he agreed that she didn’t have to stay on at the ghastly place. He rather liked the idea of taking his daughter out of the school everyone else was trying to get their daughters into; after all, they were Labour voters and supposed to believe in a state education system.

— Daniel seems perfectly happy at Langham Road, said Joyce. (When he started there Zoe had been two years at Amery-James and showed no signs of coming round to it.) Every evening if it wasn’t raining, Daniel was out with his friends in the park, playing football or cricket according to the season.

— He certainly doesn’t seem overburdened with homework.

— He’s a late developer, Joyce reassured him. You just wait. There are great depths in Daniel.

— I’ll take your word for it. They certainly haven’t been much plumbed so far. He hasn’t spoken a word to me for weeks.

It was true that if Ray passed him on the stairs Daniel actually startled, as if his father were something sinister whose existence he preferred to forget. If Ray addressed any remark to him directly, Daniel mumbled at his shoes. He never brought his friends into the house; Ray suspected this was because he didn’t want them to catch sight of his paintings. In the park, Ray knew, he was a different creature: mouthy and caustic, popular, with his mass of fair curls and easy gift for sport. His offside drive was already better than Ray’s had ever been.

Zoe brooded gloomily over the possibility of leaving Amery-James.

— But what if I don’t fit in at the new school? she asked accusingly. At Langham Road they all wear makeup and go out with boys.

— Wherever you go you will be your same self, Joyce consoled her. Anyway, I don’t expect they “all” do.

— They go out dancing at the Locarno.

— That might be nice.

Zoe gave her a dark look.

— What if I’m ruined for either school?

— It’s up to you, darling. We don’t mind one way or the other.

— How am I supposed to know? she wailed.

Ray suffered for his daughter; Joyce was brisk.

— What more can we do? She shrugged. She has to decide for herself.

Joyce was always brisk these days. She was always busy, to begin with. It was she who built the shelf units for the lounge, hair tied up in a scarf, working with a saw and a spirit level, scribbling calculations, hinging the louvered doors. Or she was on her knees, scrubbing off the stripper from the floorboards in the kitchen; or she was tiling and grouting in the new bathroom. Ray was shut out from her confabulations with the builder, Mike, their faces absorbed and rapt with costing and planning. It was awful that she had assigned to Ray the most splendid room of the house as his studio. He wanted to give it back and retreat in relief to the old inadequate space at the college he had complained about for so many years, but he didn’t dare. The new studio was so tall and white and absurdly expectant of great things from him that he found himself in reaction painting tinier and tinier pictures, book-sized, postcard-sized (he forbade himself to go any smaller).

Joyce had become beautiful in a way Ray had not calculated for; flamboyant, perming her hair into thick waves, flaunting her backside in tight white trousers and her front in clinging T-shirts or low-cut filmy blouses in psychedelic colors. He prowled after the baffling, arousing woman she had become around a home that seemed to be always full of other people. He would find Joyce closeted clandestinely with her Uncle Dick in his policeman’s overcoat and graying film-star war-hero good looks. (Their meetings were clandestine because Dick’s new wife — not the woman he’d left Aunt Vera for — wasn’t all that much older than Joyce and didn’t like him to have anything to do with his previous family.) Ray had no idea why Joyce gave Dick house room, let alone ladling out her homemade flapjacks and perked coffee and all the sweetness of her engaged attention for him as if she were hungry for his approval. When he left he stuffed a five-pound note into her apron or her pocket and she cried over it. Ray kept out of the way in case Dick tried to advise him on tongue-and-groove paneling or the purchase of taps (he didn’t seem able to discuss such matters with a woman).

Joyce had to make elaborate arrangements so that Dick wouldn’t run into Vera; since she retired from teaching she had also taken to popping round. (“We have to have her,” Joyce assured him. “Why do you think Pete took himself off to the other side of the world?”) Vera was engaged in self-improvement, taking Russian classes, cycling over the heath for exercise. She enrolled at the university Extra-Mural Department for a course on The Nude in Art and hovered in an agony of indecision between being proud of her relationship to a successful painter and appalled at what he painted. “It’s not that I’m a prude, Ray,” she said. “It’s just that you make it all look so ugly.” Or sometimes the kitchen would be overflowing with women unknown to Ray, frantic as an aviary with their high-pitched chattering. As if she didn’t have enough else to do, Joyce had taken it upon herself to organize a craft cooperative, selling goods on a stall in the covered market. The kitchen table would be piled with pots, peg dolls, felt mice, prints, batik tea cosies, greeting cards made of pressed flowers, macramé hangings for plant pots. Joyce worked out the rotas and manned the stall two days a week. She sewed patchwork jackets and waistcoats in the evenings while she watched telly, and was voracious for scraps; she had her scissors into his old shirts and ties sometimes before he’d even worn them out.

From time to time in his flight around the house, Ray stumbled in some quiet spot upon Fiona, Zoe’s little friend, and they exchanged complicit glances, as if neither of them had any very good reason to be there. Fiona had had her hair done in what Zoe impatiently informed him was a feather cut: short, with long ends trailing down the nape of her neck. With her head freed and her eyes with their deep steady gaze exposed, she looked like a rough little waif from a Dutch genre painting. She wore blue eye shadow and plucked her eyebrows into a quizzical arch; she had stayed small, while Zoe grew taller and more awkwardly skinny.

— Fiona’s such an attractive girl, said Joyce. I’d love to dress her. It’s a pity about the dreadful way she does her eyes.

— I like them, said Ray. The eyes are exactly what I like.

— Do you really? You wouldn’t let Zoe do it.

— Wouldn’t I? Anyway, it wouldn’t suit her. But Fiona’s a sharp little kid. I like her; I’m glad Zoe’s got all sorts of friends. Some of those Amery-James types are pretty ghastly. I see them parading out when I pick her up. How come the private schools get more than their fair share of the ugly ones?

Ray persuaded Fiona to sit for him. She stepped warily the first time into the empty white space of the studio (she couldn’t be any warier of it than he was), but she made an excellent model, keeping obediently still for longer than he had thought possible at her age, not self-conscious, not wanting to talk. Zoe visited them suspiciously with coffees and biscuits, explaining to her friend that Ray always made things “look funny,” and she mustn’t expect much. He did two paintings (small ones) of Fiona in the buttoned-up Crombie with a triangle of red handkerchief sticking out of its pocket, which apparently was de rigeur for skinheads. He made her face a funny crumpled shape like a little intelligent dog, staring knowingly out of the frame without smiling; in one of the paintings she held a cigarette tight between fingers curled into a fist.

— You’re not supposed to know I smoke, she said, when she gave the picture her coolly appraising stare. He thought she liked it.

He took her hand (stubby, not beautiful) and unfurled her yellow fingers to show her how he guessed.

* * *

Something crumbled slowly in zoe’s fixed idea of things. The yearning that had been for a lost past swung into a different, present, plane; she began responding to the idea of “ordinary people” with the same vibration of romance that had once thrilled at “olden days.” She told girls at school that she was a Communist, although she had only a vague idea of what that might involve. She knew it was defiant; she knew communism, which her father spoke about with a tender but wary excitement, envisaged an order of things that would do away with the game of advantage as played at Amery-James. Ray and Joyce used “anticommunist” as a disparaging critique of certain kinds of things that were said on the news; there was a hopefulness, a moving optimism about human possibilities, in believing that the communist countries were probably much better than some people wanted you to think. When there was a general election in her third year, she was proud of driving up to school in Ray’s shabby old Cortina with Labour stickers in the back window.

Fiona wasn’t getting on very well with her mother. Jean had left Brights and was working in a café making greasy breakfasts; she complained that she couldn’t get the smell of frying out of her clothes or her hair. She was still pretty, although she was putting on weight around her waist and her complexion was muddier. She always asked Zoe how she was getting on at school. When Zoe said she was thinking of changing to Langham Road, Jean gave her a sharp look, almost as if she’d seen through with contempt to some effort of Zoe’s to ingratiate herself.

— What would you want to go to that dump for? You should think yourself lucky, at the grammar school.

— She’s a bleeding liability, said Fiona, upstairs in Zoe’s bedroom, tapping an Embassy Regal out of her packet with one hand in a deft habituated movement. Zoe didn’t smoke, out of fear that she’d make a mess of it. Humbly she brought ashtrays. According to Fiona, Jean’s latest boyfriend was “the strong and silent type.”

— So silent, he’s only learned about twenty words, and most of them aren’t very nice. She has to account to him for where she is every moment of the day, or he starts breaking the place up. I can’t wait to get out of there and get somewhere of my own, I honestly can’t.

Zoe registered this grown-up proposition with a lurch of awe: the time for her to leave behind her room in the family house seemed to belong in some era of the remote future.

— What about your dad, she wondered shyly. Have you ever thought about going to stay with him?

— Oh, him. Fiona gave her a look. No, thank you: not unless I wanted to spend my life in a pub and live on fish and chips.

In many ways this was the most intimate period of their relationship. Fiona confided in Zoe as she never had before.

— I want to stay on at school, she said. I want to get good qualifications. I’d like to study languages and be one of those secretaries who work doing translations or stuff. I’m going to go to London, get myself a flat.

They spent some time then going into the details of how they would decorate their flats. Zoe had visited a friend of her mother’s in a tiny mews apartment in central London, painted in white and turquoise, with a table that let down from the wall on a rope and a bathtub in the kitchen that covered with a board to make a work surface. Both of them were entranced by the idea of this. All Fiona’s plans seemed possible to Zoe. Fiona would know how to manage these things — dashing to work on the tube in the mornings, growing perfect nails with half-moon cuticles, shopping for tea for one — as Zoe never would. In elegant midiskirts and black patent leather boots, she would look like the models in the fashion magazines, with their mournful faces full of initiated knowledge.

— And the one thing for certain I don’t want is some cretinous boyfriend glooming around in the background, said Fiona with puritan zeal, and Zoe earnestly agreed.

* * *

The girls were paid to help out sometimes with joyce’s parties. Joyce would work herself into a frenzy of preparation, cleaning and cooking. The house had to look like a dream of its perfect self: the tall light rooms with their floor-length windows, the wrought-iron balcony laden with pots of flowers, huge rice-paper lampshades, walls hung with paintings and drawings and huge tarnished old mirrors in crumbling gilt frames, rough North African blankets and Joyce’s patchwork cushions heaped up together on the low white sofa. The production of the dream was grim sweating effort; Joyce, her hair wrapped in a scarf, rapped out her orders according to a meticulously prepared plan of attack. When the dusting and polishing and vacuuming was done, the food (which she would have been getting ready for days) had to be arranged on the huge pine kitchen table: bowls of tomato and bean salads set out, parsley finely chopped, the home-baked ham sliced, the lemon fridge cake cut, paper napkins layered between all the plates.

Fiona had the right deft touch for all this; Joyce delegated to her and praised her “good design sense.” Zoe was given the easier jobs, like mixing chives in the potato salad, where it didn’t matter if things looked a mess. She asked whether Jean might be invited to the party. Whenever the two mothers met, Joyce was obliviously condescending, and Zoe, watching, saw that Jean kept a private reserve of skeptical dislike behind the awkward appreciative noises at “the lovely house” and “all your artistic things.” She longed to repair this breach.

— I’m not really sure she would fit in, darling, said Joyce doubtfully.

Anyway, Fiona wouldn’t hear of it.

“The party” loomed in anticipation, the capacious repository of hopes and imaginings: anything was possible. There was a joy in being part of the team behind the scenes, working in coordination, haunted by the idea of the crowd that would fill up the expectant spaces. They talked of the guests in tones at once slavishly subordinate and derisory. “They’re bound to put wineglasses down on the polished surfaces.” “What sort of time d’you think we should make coffee? Otherwise they’ll just go on and on drinking.” “Put ashtrays everywhere. Some of them will stub out their cigarettes on the furniture, if they can’t see one.”

Until the last moments, Joyce was demonic, snapping, frantic, possessed by the plan; Ray sulked, disclaiming any involvement in the contemptible female-ordered complexities of socializing with one’s kind. They transformed into their laughing lighthearted social selves at the very stroke of the doorbell announcing the first guests (Zoe and Daniel had for years done clowning imitations of this abrupt about-face). Joyce was suddenly radiant, relaxed, ready for fun, big crescent-shaped pewter and turquoise earrings (to match her turquoise halter-neck top) dangling under her thick red hair that had so many colors in it: pink, red, honey, straw. She glanced offhandedly at the rooms glowing with her labors as if they had arrived in that condition accidentally and somewhat to her surprise. Around Ray’s booming voice, holding forth as he opened bottles, and Joyce’s peals of laughter at someone’s funny story, the party took off.

The girls had to go around filling up glasses; in their giggling retreats to the kitchen for more wine, Zoe explained who people were. Her Aunt Ann was wearing a white Ossie Clark dress with a red rose in her cleavage. Yoyo, an architect, was supposed to be one of Mum’s old boyfriends. Alan Frisch (everybody called him just “Frisch”) was a painter, even weirder than Dad, with bits of straw and stuff stuck onto paint as thick as mud, and Dad was jealous of him. Dud Mason was there with his second wife, very pregnant. The two beautiful young doctors had an “open marriage” and had adopted colored babies. Uncle Martin, Mum’s brother, had brought his latest girlfriend, a Swedish au pair. (Uncle Martin had invented a synthetic fiber that soaked up oil and was trying to sell it to the government to use on spillages from tankers at sea; Mum and Aunt Ann had small prototypes for taking the fat off the top of casseroles.) Dad’s sister Fran had brought the cousins to stay the night, but they were little and had been put to bed.

Later, when everyone had had supper, and all the poised perfection of the house had been sucked down into a vortex of wine and music and smoke and food debris littered everywhere, Zoe and Fiona were probably supposed to go to bed too, but by that time the adults in the house had abdicated all responsibility and no one cared, so they sat side by side on the stairs sharing a bowl of salted peanuts, squeezing apart to make a gap when anyone wanted to go up to the bathroom. They took turns making forays into the lounge, where the party was thickest, pretending to be looking for plates to clear, then reporting back on who was loud, who was happy, who was drunk, who was flirting. Joyce was usually flirting, radiantly and decorously holding off some dedicated man. (“She’s awfull,” deplored Zoe.) Ray would be at the center of whichever knot of debate and dissent was most intense. (“Jesus Christ,” they heard him shouting. “This is the tragedy of art under the later stages of capitalism. Success is failure. Failure is success.”) The guests had been putting on Jefferson Airplane and the Stones and Dory Previn; now Aunt Ann was dancing to “The Age of Aquarius,” absorbed and solitary, weaving her arms around snakily, unpinning one by one the strands of her thick dark hair from where her hairdresser had pinned them up, and letting them fall onto her bare tanned shoulders. Uncle Cliff (who had just done a deal selling luminous paint to slaughterhouses in Sweden) watched over her through his puffing of cigar smoke from the sofa. He was short and plump, with a sprouting mustache and thick hair that looked like a wig although it wasn’t, and he had driven her to the party in his Jaguar.

* * *

When zoe finally left amery-james and went to langham road and was much happier there, she saw even in the first week that Fiona wouldn’t be able to be her friend at school. Just crossing the gap between the schools could not bring her inside Fiona’s world. Even at Langham Road there were gradations and abysses of status and identity, so that Zoe quickly found herself belonging in the set of quiet studious safe ones (though the studying was so easy now that she was usually fairly effortlessly top of the class). Fiona receded ahead of her among the unattainably different bad girls who were glamorous and dangerous, with heavily made-up faces and short skirts and shirts stretched tight to bursting over developed thighs and breasts. Platform heels click-clacking, they yelled and catcalled their way along the school corridors, congregating in the toilets to smoke and do their eyes and sometimes wreak a kind of mayhem of unrolled toilet paper and blocked sinks or a mess of flour and eggs if it was someone’s birthday (the eggs had to be ritually broken on their heads). Fiona, of course, wasn’t one of the rudest or roughest; her appeal as ever was in how she held back with a reserve of watchful fastidious amusement from their excesses.

Some of this crowd Zoe knew from junior school, Jackie Potter and June Fitch and a few of the boys, although none of them ever acknowledged that they remembered her. (Gary Lyons had been killed with three friends, driving a stolen car.) Most of them were only waiting to leave school at sixteen and find work in shops or offices or garages or at the cigarette factory (whereas Zoe’s new friends had ambitions: not to go to university, perhaps, but to teacher training college or into local government). At Langham Road the teachers often liked the bad ones, even though they were constantly in trouble. Their attention as teachers naturally had to be mostly on the obedient boys and girls who would take and pass examinations, but in truth they couldn’t help looking yearningly across at the wild children, especially those progressive teachers whose ideal was a kind of revolutionary rescue of the disregarded and a redress through art or books or politics of the system that failed them. The men teachers were more flattered by the bad girls’ teasing than by the adulation of the good girls; this contained flirtation was one of the strong dynamics in the school, smoldering and giving off its steady heat.

Fiona was not unfriendly to Zoe at school. She was even in some of her top set classes, because she was good at languages and quick-thinking; but she sat slightly apart like an honored visitor from another tribe, greeting Zoe with a wink or a hand quickly touched onto her shoulder when she passed behind her chair. Zoe was grateful for that much. On one exceptional occasion, they did spend an afternoon together: this was in the fifth year, and they had by this time stopped seeing each other out of school. They were supposed to be doing games, but at Langham Road you could easily avoid this if you wanted to; you could carry tennis rackets, for instance, over to where some group was practicing athletics and look perpetually as if you were on your way somewhere else. (Zoe rejoiced at her escape from the frozen drudgery of the hockey pitch and the vicious competition of the netball court at Amery-James.) It was one of those April days that seem exquisite through windows, with a perfect china-blue sky and bright puffs of white cloud; in fact, a fierce wind had been blowing for hours and she and Fiona shuddered with cold in their thin games blouses and went to find shelter behind the groundsman’s shed at the edge of the field. Scraps of brilliant-green young growth from the trees and bushes growing on the boundary had been torn off by the winds and were heaped up against the shed, an autumn harvest of spring leaves.

— I’ve got something to show you, said Fiona. She undid a button and felt around her neck inside her blouse, her olive skin smooth and clear apart from a couple of dark moles, the glimpsed shadowy swell of her breasts in their lace bra mysterious and adult. Zoe, who was tall and clumsy and flat-chested and had to wear an orthodontic brace, felt shamed beside her perfection. Fiona pulled out a ring on a fine gold chain.

— Look. I’m engaged. Only it’s a secret. You’re not to tell anyone.

— Engaged? But who to?

— No one you know. No one at this school. He’s much older. And he’s not from round here.

The ring was warm from lying against Fiona’s skin. Zoe examined it helplessly: gold, with a green stone, cheap-looking to her. Fiona leaned back against the slatted shed wall with her eyes closed, her arms hugged round her knees against the cold.

— He loves me, she said, slowly and voluptuously. He’s crazy about me. He can’t get enough of me. He wants me to leave school and have his babies and all this stuff.

— Oh, my God, Fiona. You mustn’t do that. Remember what you always said? You want to get a good job as a translator, remember, and a flat in London? And you’re only sixteen.

— Oh, yes. And I might still do all that. I haven’t decided anything. I haven’t said when we will marry or anything.

But her face was suffused with thoughts that made her eyes open wide and heated her skin. The way her mouth slipped secretively round the word “marry” made Zoe know she was lost. This wasn’t what Zoe had expected, and she felt cheated.

— You mustn’t give it all up for a boy, she said. There’s the rest of your life for that.

— He isn’t a boy, said Fiona, dropping the ring on its chain back down into her blouse, where it was hidden. He’s a man. That’s what’s different. You’ll see.

* * *

And so they parted. fiona did stay on for a few months in the sixth form to do A-levels with the hardworking girls and boys, but she was fatally bored; she yawned openly in class; all the liveliest of her friends had left. Zoe was happy there, but she saw it would not do for Fiona. At about the same time that Fiona stopped turning up for classes, Jean left her job at the corner café and moved from the flat opposite the heath, and so Zoe lost touch with them finally and totally. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Life filled up so quickly with other things, changing during those years at such a rate it seemed as though almost every six months or so you shed one self and stepped into a new one, leaving behind a phase of your personality and your role and your desires as mere discarded skin.

Once during the summer before she went up to read history at Cambridge (it had turned out to be that easy to do well at Langham Road), Zoe thought she might have seen Fiona again. It was an odd sour summer; things were happening at home. Daniel was playing in a band; he had moved into a sordid flat with filthy purple and orange wallpaper and was taking a lot of speed and dropping acid. He told Zoe in all seriousness that he saw eels swimming around in the toilet. Ray was mostly at work on a new series of pictures in his studio at college (having a studio in the house hadn’t worked out); these were the studies of Moira, a sixty-year-old schizophrenic who lived in hostels and on the streets, that many would rate afterward as his best work. When he was home he always seemed to be on the phone to friends. As Zoe lay on her bed, she could hear his voice climbing up and down, booming and hectoring, taking up much more than his half share of the conversation; without being able to hear his words, she could guess that the gist of it was how he was always right, how he knew so much better than everybody else, how everybody else was an idiot or a sellout, you couldn’t expect anyone to understand. She could tell from this that he was unhappy.

That summer they all seemed to be listening out for signs of life and clues as if they hardly knew one another. In the middle of one night, Zoe woke as instantly and completely as if a clear small bell had sounded through her dreams; her mother was speaking downstairs to someone in a voice of such quiet tenderness and sweetness that Zoe’s heart twisted. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, and she didn’t recognize the male voice (it certainly wasn’t Ray’s, and anyway Ray was probably sleeping at the studio). A deep vibrating bass responded to Joyce’s sweetness like counterpoint, like some essence of male and female interaction. They were speaking together so softly and discreetly, being so considerate of the sleeping house, it was only through some miracle of intuition that Zoe had woken up to hear it at all. After a while Joyce closed the front door very quietly; then Zoe knew from the intimate creakings of the old house that her mother was moving around downstairs, not bustling or tidying, just wandering between the rooms, barefoot on the thick carpets.

Zoe had got a job for the summer, working in a dry cleaners in St. Peters. They had the contract for the New Theatre; there had been flooding in the theater wardrobes. It was Zoe’s special assignment to go through the plastic bags of sodden costumes, ticketing them and sorting them for treatment, growing emotional from handling the sad largesse of soggy flounces, brocades, beads, veils, velvets. She worked in a big airless back room and didn’t often need to visit the front of the shop, but one afternoon she went in to ask the manageress something about her hours just as a customer was going out of the door: a young dark-haired woman, pregnant, struggling with a baby in a push chair and a small child on reins. It was only after Zoe had asked Mrs. Doyle her question that she was suddenly convinced this customer had been Fiona Martin. Explaining hurriedly, knowing how foolish she must seem, she scrambled under the counter and ran after her into the street. There was quite a crowd of shoppers and several women with push chairs.

She called Fiona’s name, and one of them turned round. She really looked very like Fiona, although her long hair was hennaed and tangled and she was dressed carelessly in an old T-shirt and slacks stretched over her pregnant stomach, as if she hadn’t even looked in a mirror that morning. Her face (if she was Fiona) was still fresh and her eyebrows had grown back into their pure clear line. She did smile and look hard at Zoe, but only for a moment or two, before turning away, as if after all she hadn’t recognized her, and forging on with the push chair, hitching the reins a half turn tighter round her hand to keep the walking child close by her side.

Zoe checked the ticket on the garment she had deposited and it wasn’t in any name she knew; but then, Fiona would probably have been married. She had hoped it might be something pretty for her imagination to work on, a party dress, something springlike; but it was only a man’s cheap suit, worn and with something spilled down the front of the jacket. Mrs. Doyle promised her that if anyone came in to pick it up while Zoe was there she’d let her know (Zoe did check from time to time, and one day the suit was gone without anyone having mentioned it). For some reason this nonencounter was a strong blow; Mrs. Doyle found Zoe half an hour later struggling in tears over a bronze-colored satin petticoat thick with stinking mud too wet to brush off. She made her a hot sweet cup of tea and put an arm around her shoulders, blaming the dry cleaning chemicals.

Zoe read all sorts of things into the young woman’s long look at her (it grew longer in memory): irony; condemnation; a knowledge of Zoe’s life, all her superficial success, her self-important cleverness; an intimation of unreality in Zoe’s very existence. Fiona hadn’t even been willing to exchange a few words with her, as though she suspected that Zoe’s very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for “Cambridge,” for arty parents and a big house.

Probably, Zoe knew, she had made all this up. Probably the woman hadn’t been Fiona in the first place, just some projection onto a stranger of her idea of how Fiona’s life might have been: her body subdued to the discipline of that unimaginable mother’s life, her expression one of weary skepticism, as if she was awakened to something Zoe hadn’t even begun to be able to see.