Everything Will Be All Right

Six

Usually, Zoe didn’t stay the night with Simon. After they’d finished making love he would send her home, always much too soon for Zoe, who would be drifting into a sweet heaviness among the crumpled dragged sheets and the mounds of pillow and kicked-aside duvet. She would have given anything to sink down and down and find her sleep inside the heat of his nearness, inside the smell of him, peppery and astringent. But Simon would never lie stilled and satisfied for long. If she lay with her face pressed against his fine rib cage or his long honey-brown back she felt the change of his mood distinctly, like something chemical altering in his tissues: abandonment and languor transforming into alertness, then restlessness, and then, if she stayed too long, or resisted or protested, into impatience. So she would force herself awake, and find and pull on the clothes she had carelessly torn off, and fish around on the dark floor for her sandals. Her head would be swimming and her legs still trembling. Sometimes she even felt nauseated: this was shock at the sheer effort, she thought, of taking back into rational possession the flesh that had been so opened up and lost.

Simon would get up and put on his jeans and help her find her things. He would come with her to the back door and check that her bike lamp worked. He didn’t like her to kiss him goodbye; he said he “preferred to keep things separate.” She cycled off, doing her best not to wobble for as long as he could see her, making her way confusedly until she woke up properly to the empty night streets: a narrow way between sleeping terraced cottages, then Mitchams Corner roundabout, where in the day the lanes of traffic thundered but now the traffic lights often changed color only for her, although she still obediently waited, one foot on the road, when they were on red. Sometimes, although she never remembered this when she was with Simon, she was afraid as she pedaled home: that someone would leap from the bushes and drag her down as she crossed Jesus Green or that when she had to get into college through the underground bike shed because the gates were locked, someone would be lurking there to rape her and smother her.

It was a cold winter. By the time she climbed the staircase to her room, her jaw would be in spasms of shuddering and her hands even inside her gloves would be frozen into the shape of her grip on the handlebars. Because her room was one of the modern conversions in the attic, it didn’t have a gas fire, only an inadequate electric heater, so when she undressed for the second time she kept her socks and pants and T-shirt on under her nightdress, piled her coat and dressing gown on top of her duvet, and lay shivering in her bed, hugging her knees. She didn’t mind all this. She imagined that somehow she was testing herself, hardening herself, making herself more like Simon. In her half sleep she dreamed that she was hugging cold steel to her breast and that even the pain it caused did her honor.

* * *

Simon told her he had been insomniac since he was a child; night had become the time when he read and wrote. A big old office desk, stained with ink and scarred with ancient jagged scratches as if someone had once raged against it, was pulled under the window of his room in the house he shared with student friends. The walls of the room were papered in a glowering green splodged with brown motifs that sometimes looked like grinning demon faces; he didn’t care, he didn’t notice it. When Zoe was gone, he worked. When she returned, the desk would be heaped with new piles of books bent open to some important page, new sheets of scribbled notes in his neat black writing, difficult to decipher because he formed so many of the letters with the same steep uphill curves. His reading often had nothing to do with the papers he was supposed to be preparing for, but his supervisors didn’t seem to mind. One week it was American poets: Ashbery and Ed Dorn. (He didn’t like Ginsberg.) The next week it was Arthur Golding’s translations of Ovid, and then Brecht’s Little Organum for the Theatre and then Villon, and then critical books and books of philosophy (new names to her: Saussure and Barthes). He would crawl into bed before dawn and sleep all through the morning; he never went to any lectures.

It was true that this wouldn’t have fit in with Zoe’s rhythms at all. She was up before eight and always had a good breakfast of muesli and whole wheat toast, to set her up for lectures and work in the university library. Simon woke in the afternoon, and drank black coffee, and hardly remembered to eat unless she brought him something. He wouldn’t sit down to a meal but cut himself pieces of cheese or bread and ate them while walking about or looking out of the window. Sometimes one of the others in the house cooked a pan of chili or spaghetti Bolognese, and they would all eat standing up in the kitchen, which nobody ever cleaned, with its sink full of dishes and its burned pans and the patina of oily grime on all its surfaces. Zoe admired the kitchen as evidence of their minds on higher things.

She had known from the first time she saw him that Simon was brilliant. When she came to the college for her interview, she had been put in the charge of a first-year historian with straw-dry fair hair and blotched-pink plump arms and circles of sweat on her shirt who was supposed to take her on a tour and talk about her experiences of university life. Her name was Amanda. (They had studiously avoided recognizing each other ever since Zoe turned up the following October in her own right.) Zoe suspected that Amanda’s experiences of university life thus far had not been altogether sweet and she was understandably reluctant to share them; also, she was having trouble that day with the leather thong that fastened one of her sandals. At Amanda’s very worst moment — when her sandal had slipped right in the middle of crossing a busy road with fast cars and she had had to save herself in a sort of undignified running stumble, hanging on to her heel — a boy had passed them going the other way, pausing to look up and down at the traffic just long enough for Zoe to take him in, not even seeming to see the two girls caught out in their weakness at his feet.

— Who was that? Zoe asked.

Amanda could hardly be expected to recognize every student they saw. However, something in her hot face and angry concentration bent over her sandal gave away how his passing caused a definitive sharpening of her pain. She didn’t even bother to pretend to turn around to see who Zoe meant.

— Simon Macy, she spat out. English scholarship. First year. Very brilliant, apparently. Destined for great things and all that. I’ve never spoken to him, so I’ve got no idea.

Neither of them chose to mention his narrow hips, the long wolfish lean lope, the skinny T-shirt under an Oxfam-shop suit jacket, the straight jeans, and the Chinese canvas sandals. Or the stormy marks on the fine clear face, purple shadows under his eyes and beside his nose, a tension where his jaw was hinged, the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Or the thick long brown-black hair pushed carelessly behind his ears, or the cigarette held dangling in his fingers. These were imprinted, though, on Zoe’s imagination, even before she heard that he was also destined for greatness.

When she decided at Langham Road to take the Cambridge entrance examination, she hadn’t had any idea which college to apply to. No one in her family had been to Cambridge, and only one of her teachers. She browsed through the brochure and chose the place that looked nicest in the photograph. Only a few of the colleges were mixed. She wouldn’t contemplate an all-girls’ college; she thought it would be like Amery-James all over again. What luck, she thought, when she saw Simon! What luck to have chosen his college. She only thought that if she got in she would see him from time to time. She never dreamed she would ever speak to him.

* * *

The others who lived in simon’s house were fairly brilliant too, although they weren’t so beautiful. Marty, with untidy shoulder-length curls and dark-rimmed glasses, was a gifted linguist doing Arch and Anth (Modern Languages too boring, just translation and the lower forms of criticism). Joshua, freckled and lisping, was supposed to be doing English, although he smoked too much and never finished any work and Peterhouse had threatened to kick him out: his dad was an Oxford economist and a friend of Michael Foot. Lennard had a strong Manchester accent and a proletarian rage, although his parents were teachers at a grammar school; he was tiny and vivid and spotted and did history, favouring the annales approach of Braudel and Bloch. Zoe was the only girlfriend. Lennard was intermittently in pursuit of a half-Polish nurse with a wide heart-shaped face, slanting eyes, and shapely breasts; whenever Trina came round they all commented afterward on how good it was to spend time with someone from the “real world” and how refreshing her intuitive sound judgment. She made them almost meek. She told them their kitchen was disgusting and refused to eat anything they cooked in it.

These friends were vociferous in their arguments. They did not argue about personal things, they treated one another’s private lives with elaborate tactful avoidance, almost squeamishness. Simon, for instance, did not know until Zoe told him that Marty had two younger sisters or that Joshua had been desperately ill when he was fifteen with hepatitis. But they reserved for one another’s opinions a bluntness and cavalier contempt that made Zoe quake. Marty was a member of the Cambridge Amnesty International group and sat for hours in a cage outside Kings to raise awareness; Lennard hung around and shouted through the bars at him that human rights were a bourgeois conception and Amnesty a tool of American imperial ideology. Simon argued that the future of literary analysis probably lay in computer-assisted readings of stylistics; Joshua groaned and said that was just more clever boys solving chess problems. Simon thought English was a subject for dilettante belle-lettrists anyway, and history dreary empiricism; he would have done sciences, only his maths wasn’t good enough. Marty argued that Simon’s beloved Brecht had betrayed the proletariat in the 1953 uprising in the GDR and that his layman’s enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology ignored the problems there were in reconciling his closed systems with the results of fieldwork.

— Brecht’s not my beloved anything, said Simon. Although you’re being pigheadedly naive about the options available to him in 1953. But I don’t have beloved writers. Love doesn’t come into it. If you want the smearing of disgusting empathy across the text, it’s Josh who goes in for that kind of thing.

— Fuck you, said Josh. Fuck fuck fuck you, you cunt.

— You see? said Simon. For him it’s all feeling.

They didn’t argue with Zoe.

She was very tentative, anyway, in putting her opinions to them; these were all second-years, living out in their own place free from the childishness of life in college. She had no idea how you attained their kind of bold certainty, which was almost a physical attribute like deep voices or broad shoulders; she felt her own inward contemplation much less steady and more flickering than theirs. And so when she proffered something into the conversation, it tended to produce a blank effect, like a missed beat in a complex pattern of exchange and response; or Marty would kindly pick up something close to what she’d dropped as if he was covering for her. Simon in particular never responded directly to anything she said, unless they were alone.

They were talking, for example, about the kidnappings (there had been a spate of them: Schleyer in the autumn, Empain and Moro in the new year). The newspapers printed the photograph the Red Brigade had sent to Moro’s family; he was holding a copy of La Repubblica with the headline MORO ASSASSINATO? Lennard called it the symbolic enactment of profound class antagonisms; Marty feared the romance with terrorism was a dangerous distraction for left politics.

— They’re not fools, said Simon. Look at how cleverly the photograph exploits a classical aesthetic: the powerful man brought low; the end already known and named; the moral painted on the wall behind. It’s pure spectacle.

— I wonder what he thinks, said Zoe. I wonder what he was thinking while the picture was taken.

Simon got up abruptly and left the kitchen. He would do this in the middle of a conversation; afterward she would find him reading in another room.

Lennard hunted with fierce rustlings through the rest of the newspaper.

— Who knows the footie scores?

— Do you think he only hates them? Zoe persisted. Or do you think it’s possible he begins to see himself through their eyes?

— Did City win?

— It’s a sweet idea, Zoe, said Marty.

— But who cares? said Lennard. It isn’t personal. He isn’t a person, he’s the representative of a system.

When Moro’s body was found a few weeks later in the boot of a car, Zoe felt as if it was a response to her sentimentality: a brutal shutting up of hopefulness and personal interest.

She studied the things that Trina said, which everybody liked. This was because Trina was natural; she wasn’t trying to impress anyone, she didn’t think before she spoke. Zoe could perhaps have tried playing the role of this natural female, washing up their dishes and chiding them for their laziness and dirtiness, chattering about shopping and clothes. But then this wouldn’t in fact have been natural in her, only another complicating layer of falsity, in which Simon would surely have found her out.

* * *

Zoe was able to see the romance of the old university. she experienced an appropriate thud of aesthetic response whenever she walked up over the Backs, past the gardens and over the bridge and into the seventeenth-century college court. And yet she never felt it was really hers. She was only admiring those things as a passer-through. Also, she found herself fairly indifferent to the weight of tradition that squeezed some of the other students so painfully. She only once wore her gown and had formal dinner in Hall, with Latin grace. After that she used the cafeteria in the basement. The oldness of the university and its complex hierarchies and all the inhibiting burden of competition and thirst for acceptance that it imposed didn’t loom dreadfully and overwhelmingly for her; they didn’t interest her much. People anxiously questioned about where you had been to school. She told them proudly that she had come from a comprehensive (Amery-James was her secret.) In the political climate of the late 1970s they were obliged to respect you for that, whatever they privately thought.

She was probably able to step around the workings of the place so casually because she was a girl. The traditions of belonging weren’t designed around girls; it was easy not to be hooked in. Her mother had hinted that at Cambridge at last she would meet boys who’d appreciate her (no doubt doing some private calculations about the tiny numbers of women in relation to men). But in reality the effect of that outnumbering when she first got there, before she had Simon, was that it had made Zoe feel invisible, canceled out. Of course there were a few beauties among the girls, who attracted attention and were feted and pursued. But she was never going to be one of those. She had dressed so as to make sure no one even thought she was trying to be one of those, in trousers and sweaters and a duffel coat.

She had worked hard from the beginning, but that hadn’t been entirely satisfactory either. What she had expected when she came was passionate argument; instead, for the first few months she had the sensation of swallowing down mouthfuls of ideas she wasn’t able to share with anyone. You were supposed to pour out all your arguments in writing in your essay, and then your supervisor would make a few responses in the margin or explain some controversy of interpretation of the facts or recommend further reading. This wasn’t the exchange she had longed for. And she had got herself into a group of nice-enough friends who would only talk about their subject chaffingly, jokingly. They loved history, they often knew more than she did, they could confound her with their information, but the way they spoke about it kept it fenced in like an absorbing hobby. They teased Zoe for taking things too seriously.

Simon embodied the intellectual passion she had dreamed of. He made no separation between his life and his work. He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship, as if writing were a matter as serious as life and death. She knew he changed himself, in response to what he read. Perhaps Zoe still didn’t get the arguments she had expected. But she didn’t mind swallowing down her own ideas, as long as she could be sure she was submitting to the real, the superior, thing.

* * *

Simon told zoe things he never told anyone else. under the hot dark tent of the duvet — their bodies tangled together in his single bed so that she couldn’t see his face, his voice muffled in the pillow, vibrating in his chest where she pressed her head against him — he let slip fragments of information about himself. The broken pieces were often confusing and incomplete, as if he was giving them to her deliberately in a code she didn’t yet know how to read; she put all her effort into patiently learning to interpret the least stirrings of his thought, his most opaque remarks. She hardly knew where this confidence of his came from, that she could be trusted to guard what she knew about him with instincts of concealment and protectiveness as fierce as his own. But he was right to trust her; she didn’t tell anyone, not for years and years.

She told him plenty about her life, too, and readily, when he seemed to want to know; he would listen with affectionate interest. When they were alone he called her his “pony” because of her long mane of straight light-brown hair, and her fringe always falling over her eyes. He was surprised when she said she didn’t think she was pretty. (“You’re nice,” he said. “Clear eyes, these straight eyebrows like brushstrokes, this wide sensual mouth she keeps so carefully closed. A shy pony, nervous with strangers but will take food at my hand. Why would I have wanted her, if I hadn’t thought she was nice?”) She told him she had been an obstinate little girl and an awkward teenager, and he found for her a Goethe poem — one of the Roman Elegies — that said the vine blossoms were unpromising but the ripe grapes “yielded nectar for gods and men.” She felt blessed; she learned the poem by heart (in German, which she scarcely understood). But their confidences were not given in an arrangement of mutual exchange. Hers were daylight stories (at worst, maybe her mother was having an affair); she felt ashamed now that she had ever thought she suffered.

Simon had had an older brother who had killed himself at Oxford when Simon was thirteen. He hadn’t left any note; it was even just possible that he had overdosed accidentally (the inquest had been inconclusive). Before he died he had broken up with his girlfriend (but she wasn’t important, Simon said); also, he had only got a 2.1 in his PPE finals, when he had been predicted for a First. Simon’s brother had told him what to read and what to laugh at and how to play cricket. He had written letters to Simon at boarding school every week, with funny drawings of himself falling asleep over his books, or dancing at a party, or waving placards in some political demonstration.

— I was bewildered. His death bewildered me. At that age.

— Of course, she whispered.

— Bewilder: “to lose in pathless places.”

— Yes.

— A couple of years after that, I wanted to fuck his girlfriend. I mean, before I even knew how. Ex-girlfriend. The one who, maybe. That grew to a fixation for a bit. I thought I knew how to find her. I had this idea, about if I did.

— Was she important after all, then?

— And since then I don’t sleep. Not nightmares, just awakeness. This power to hold up everything in my mind; it’s like a bright light switched on. Sometimes I think I can see everything. It’s like radar; when I look at a page I can see right through it, how it’s put together and why.

— Yes.

— I burnt Ricky’s letters. Couldn’t bear the thought of my mother getting her hands on them. Anyway, I got too old. Had to leave them behind.

— Why not your mother?

— Oh. You don’t know what they’re like. What they turned it all into.

He told her about the family house in St. Johns Wood, worth a quarter of a million; they also had a flat in Lewes and a house in Scotland. His father had been something big in ICI. There was a visitors’ book in the guest room (“they don’t have real friends, they wouldn’t know how”), and over the grand piano in the sitting room hung a portrait of his brother painted in his Winchester scholar’s gown.

— The piano isn’t there because they like music. Why did I have viola lessons every week for twelve years? It’s just “done.” How would you know you had children if you weren’t shelling out for the right school and all the appropriate cultural trimmings?

He told her how he’d fought with his father — physically, punching and kicking — when he was home from school one weekend age seventeen, and how his mother had called the police and had him arrested and he had spent the night in a police cell.

— It was because I was going around the streets at that time in bare feet. He tried to make me put shoes on. That’s why I kicked him first; he was trying to force these horrible brogues of his — you know, from some fucking Bond Street shoe shop — onto my feet. Without any socks or anything. But it was her fault. She started it. With some remark about her floors. I mean, as if my feet were any dirtier than shoes. But of course they were too naked. The real, forbidden kind of naked. Not the bikini, décolletage, socially sanctioned kind.

After Christmas his parents sent him a letter and a check (he was on the minimum grant, because of their income). Cross-legged on the stained and greasy carpet in the glow of the gas fire, his hair falling forward across his frown, Simon rolled himself a joint in fingers that actually shook: “to smoke them out of my mind.”

— It’s a kind enough letter, Zoe said lamely.

— That’s because you have no idea. Why couldn’t my father have given me the check when I was home? Then we could have looked each other in the eye for once. They’re angry with me because I won’t feel guilty taking their fucking money.

— There’s no sign that they’re angry with you. They seem very interested in what you’re doing.

— Anesthetized politeness alternating with bouts of inchoate violence. The bourgeois ethos precisely. The smothered horrors in its family life analogous precisely with its effects in the political world. How charming do you think Pinochet is at dinner parties? While at the very same moment — in the same synchronized moment in real time, say, that the Nuits-Saint Georges is being brought round by soundless-footed waiters — his special forces are dropping political prisoners out of helicopters over the sea. Under the same white moon.

— But your father isn’t Pinochet.

He looked on her darkly.

— You want to know what involvements ICI have in most of the places that figure pretty largely in Marty’s Amnesty handbook? How much time do you have?

— No, no, I do sort of know. But it’s not quite the same. I mean, there is a difference of scale. Your father hasn’t ordered anyone to be killed.

— That’s exactly the mistake that sentimental revisionism makes: imagining you can draw the line somewhere, not understanding the totalizing bourgeois worldview, how it contaminates everything it comes in contact with. It hollows out the truth and replaces it with shams that only look on the surface like real things. If you want to save yourself, you have to repudiate the whole lot, get it out from under your skin. It’s respectable housewives shopping for Yves Saint-Laurent in Selfridges who cause blood to be shed in Angola and Eritrea.

— So what should we do? asked Zoe, chastened. To live differently.

— Not torchlit Broad Left marches or picketing at Grunwick or sending telegrams of solidarity to the Chilean people, that’s for certain. Or the Nursery Action Group.

— What, then? she said, after a pause.

He shook back his hair impatiently.

— You have to change your mind. Actually change your mind.

Zoe bent over his mother’s letter again. There was news of relatives Zoe hadn’t heard of, of a dog who wasn’t well. Simon wasn’t to work too hard or forget to enjoy himself. This was written hastily, and then underlined, with “Please” and a question mark.

— It sounds as if she’s worried about you.

— And you can just imagine it. Is he taking drugs? Has he kept up the insurance on his viola? I hope if he’s sleeping with this girl he’s taking all the proper precautions. Is the mess produced by his grotty friends compromising the market value of the house we’ve invested in on his behalf?

— Perhaps she just wants you to be happy.

— Oh, well, he said, happy. Well then. Jesus Christ.

He stood abruptly and rummaged on top of his wardrobe among empty hi-fi boxes and cricket kit, squinting his eyes in the smoke from the roll-up drooping at the corner of his mouth. From underneath the mess he pulled out a brown viola case.

— Fuck the viola. Fuck that.

He put it on the floor between them. The instrument inside, when he pulled away a silk paisley scarf, was dark toffee-colored, gleaming, richly complex. Zoe for a moment thought with joy that he was going to play it. Jumbled in the case were rosin and tuning pipes and a homemade stuffed cloth chin rest with an elastic loop.

— Here’s what you have to do, he said. Here’s how to put an end to it.

And he raised his foot in its clumsy winter boot and brought it down on the viola, with a crunch and a tortured stifled jangling of the strings.

— Oh, no! cried Zoe. No! No!

* * *

In the spring she caught a virus and was ill with a high temperature for a few days. Simon made a surprisingly tender nurse. He called her a “sick little pony” and put her in his bed and brought her aspirins and made her drink glasses of lemon barley water; he wiped her face with a flannel wrung out in cold water and brushed her hair out of her way; he rang to cancel the supervision she was supposed to be having on her essay on the taxation policies of Edward III. Then he sat at his desk and worked, and through the vertiginous swoopings and retreats of her delirium she was aware of something deeply consoling in the steadily turned pages and the patterings of his Biro. He read her a poem by Beckett, and in her dreams, obedient to its instructions, she wandered back and forward in a shadowy bare corridor between doors that slid shut at her approach; after a while, though, she added some kind of brightly colored darting bird that had never been in the original, and then the corridor was lined in red velvet and ran twisting underground and became her sore throat, and the poem drifted away altogether.

She almost didn’t want to get better. There was something delicious in this enforced passivity, handing responsibility over to him, with no need to think or act for herself; although she also knew that she ought to be ashamed of such weakness and that he would think less of her if he ever found her faking. And then she was deeply touched by his gentleness. This must mean — mustn’t it? — that he cared for her. She was not allowed to ask if he loved her; she’d learned that very early on.

— It’s not a word I use, he’d said. It’s a kind of sentimental bondage, like the bourgeois exchange of rings. Once I’ve said it to you, you’ll expect me to repeat it, and then sooner or later it will turn into a lie just by wearing out. The love words are dead words; they kill. You should hear it when my parents are arguing. “Don’t be ridiculous, dear.” “How dare you say that, darling?”

When she was recovered from her virus they all went off for the day to Ely, in a car Marty borrowed from a friend who kept it illicitly (undergraduates weren’t supposed to have them). It was an effervescent spring day. The wide sky over the flatland looked washed clean as a pale sea, with a few lemon-glazed strips of cloud on the horizon and bright watery sunshine; birds put back their wings and made heart-shaped dives into the low-growing scrub. It was Zoe’s first visit; they went to the cathedral and then to the Old Fire Engine House for tea. In the Lady Chapel she was overcome by the lofty cool stone vaulting and wavering greenish light like a pool of air.

— Not that it would have been like this, said Lennard sternly. It would have all been painted in bright colors. Our sense of what’s beautiful in it belongs to a purely contemporary aesthetic.

— Whatever Lennard says, Zoe said softly to Simon, while the others made their way out of the chapel and down the deep fall of worn steps, hands in pockets, actively resisting awe, whatever he says, I love it here.

He smiled and put her hair out of her face, which she knew was earnest and heated. Nervous that he might disapprove, she told him about her obsessive passion for the past when she was a child, and the longings she had had for there to be a way into it out of the present, which had seemed so ugly.

— Oh, me too, said Simon, to her surprise. There was a door at school that was always kept locked — it was probably just a laundry room or something — and I built this whole fantasy world, that if I could only press through the door I’d find myself in another time and space. I was convinced it was only a failure of my imagination that prevented me. Of course, if I got through I was always conveniently going to emerge as a member of the landed aristocracy.

— Oh, yes, me too!

— Late sixteenth century, I favored. Hawking and riding to hounds and probably getting caught up in Essex’s doomed rebellion against the old queen.

— I liked the nineteenth century.

— God, no. Who wants to come after the stinking Industrial Revolution? And all that lachrymose prudery?

— Well, I see that now.

Later, in the same spell of good weather, Simon took her punting; she brought a couple of her girlfriends who did history. He had spent the previous summer working for Scudamore’s, hiring punts out to visitors, so he was fast and flawlessly competent, as steady on his bare feet on the back of the punt as if he were on land. He stood braced with his jeans rolled up, dropping the pole through his hands until it hit the bottom, bending his knees to push against it when they were in deeper water, using it like a rudder to steer. Deftly he skimmed the dithering punts full of beginners, not even acknowledging in his expression their separate existence. The girls lay back and watched; the low-slung punt enforced the postures of idling privilege even in these studious girls, dressed in sober jeans and draggled Indian print cheesecloth skirts. They would have liked to be teasing and ironic with Simon — this was their comfortable mode — but his silence and good looks made them shy, and they slipped along the lapping green-smelling river with its flotsam of twigs and duck feathers and fag packets mostly without talking. Possibly it was not for all of them the occasion of unalloyed pleasure it must have looked to anyone watching. Yet even while Zoe was full of worried consideration for her friends (who clambered onto dry land at Grantchester as if they were made clumsier by Simon’s hand held out to help), she couldn’t help the sight of him dancing joyously on her eyelids, closed against the bright sunshine.

And one night he played her an old 78 of Kathleen Ferrier singing the “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde, in a recording made by a private collector at Carnegie Hall, so crackling and distorted that it was difficult to listen to.

— There was a period when I was quite seriously deluded, he said. I found this in a junk shop in the sixth form. I was convinced that I could hear Ricky speaking to me in the crackling. Pretty weird. But don’t you think, if the dead could come back and speak to us, it might sound like this?

— O Schönbeit, the voice sang, through a storm of interference, O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunken Welt!

— What does it mean? Zoe asked. She didn’t know much about classical music; this slightly sickened her, its suspenseful nervous expectancy and its fullness of longing.

— It’s about how the dead are in love with the world they have to leave behind.

She knew Simon was thinking about death all the time, in a way she could not imagine for herself. This was understandable — sacrosanct and forbidden territory — because of his brother. She knew that she, with her shallower life, had no authority to try to speak to him of these dark things. She only hoped that when they were making love she could pass over some healing into him out of her own deep reservoir of hopefulness and belief.

* * *

There was a wedding in zoe’s family that summer. zoe’s uncle Peter (who wasn’t strictly her uncle but her mother’s cousin) came back from America to live and work in England. He was leaving behind the American wife he had been married to for seventeen years and bringing home a new bride (English, though she had been working with him in New York), closer in age to his oldest daughter than to himself. Everyone was scandalized over the youth of the new bride; on the other hand, they couldn’t help being delighted at the thought of having Peter back among them, with his New York cleverness and sophistication. The first wife, although she was very dynamic, had fought bitterly with Peter. She had wanted to pursue her own career with a theatrical agency on Broadway and had demanded he do his share of running their household. Joyce and Ann sighed over Peter’s “chauvinism.” But they couldn’t help approving of someone who would look after him more appreciatively.

Joyce asked Zoe whether she would like to bring her “boyfriend.” Zoe winced at that awful word and thought for a moment they wouldn’t go. She had new standards of seriousness and a new sensitivity to what was right and wrong. Her parents hadn’t met Simon yet; her mother’s curiosity over the telephone (“We’re dying to get to know him, darling”) sounded almost predatory.

— He’s not my “boyfriend,” she said. It’s not like that.

— What do you mean? asked Joyce. Don’t you sleep together?

Zoe put the phone down in disgust.

They did go to the wedding anyway. Simon said he didn’t care, and secretly Zoe longed for everyone in her family to see him. Peter called them the celestial twins because they came dressed alike in white collarless shirts over jeans, and they were both tall and lean with long hair tucked behind their ears (only Simon didn’t have a fringe). The joke went around the wedding and Zoe heard other people use it, asking “Where are the twins?” and “What are the twins doing?” She felt a thrill at the idea of a connection visible to everyone, setting them apart. When Simon, as if it was not even an issue, said he was not going to sit down for the reception dinner but would wait outside, Zoe followed him into the garden without a qualm, wearing the same steady and remote smile as his (even though she’d seen where Joyce had written their names on little ornamented cards set out on a table with Daniel and their American cousins). They sat cross-legged in the sunshine beside an ornamental pond full of water lilies, smoking and watching iridescent dragonflies hovering above the lily pads. The reception was in a big eighteenth-century house in the Hilltop area of the city, which could be hired out for functions. Inside the orangery, the playing of a string quartet was half smothered by the noisy boisterousness of the wedding guests. Simon described to her a Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage.

Joyce came looking for them, carrying two full glasses.

— Time for champagne and toasts! Come on, you two! Don’t go and be so superior that you miss all the fun.

She was wearing a dress she’d made, green Liberty cotton printed with tiny bunches of cherries; her hair was cut in a new layered way that exposed too recklessly, Zoe thought, how the light red was fading underneath into colorlessness and gray. She was always vigilant for glimpses of haggardness and wear under her mother’s petite prettiness. She dreaded that Joyce would try to engage Simon in conversation, imagining she was drawing him out about Cambridge or poetry or “left-wing politics,” as she called them.

— I suppose Simon will find us all awfully loud and boisterous, Joyce said, if he isn’t used to our sort of family occasion. We do tend to let our hair down. His family’s probably much more respectable.

Simon smiled his fending-off smile.

— We’re so respectable I don’t think we even do family occasions. So I won’t be able to tell whether you’re more loud and boisterous than the average.

— We’re very rude. But I don’t care. God knows what the bride’s relatives are making of it all. They seem a bit squaresville, and they’re probably shocked.

— Mum, all right, we’ll come inside.

They stood at the back of the orangery and Simon drank down his champagne before the toasts were made and squinted through his smoke at the guests on the top table who stood up to make speeches, smiling privately to himself but not laughing at the jokes. These jokes were mostly about sex and produced loud shouting laughter and heckling from Peter’s side of the family; the bride’s relatives and the more elderly guests were more subdued. Zoe decided not to even smile.

Peter had put on weight in the last few years. His head, which had been clumsily heavy when he was younger, seemed in proportion now; his thick shoulder-length black hair was speckled with gray and he wore big tinted glasses and a patterned tie. The bride in her youthfulness was insubstantial beside him: pretty enough, blond with blue eyes and an anxious pink rash on her throat and arms. In an accent tinged with Americanisms, Peter made a witty and emotional speech, saying how happy he was at coming home at last to live close to his “beloved mother” (there was a flashed exchange of glances between Joyce and Ann). Zoe had always liked Peter’s extravagant openness, his clowning confessions (she and her family had spent two happy summers at his place in Vermont). Now she prickled uneasily as if he exposed too much. When the speeches were over and everyone was mingling, he embarrassed her by reminiscing nostalgically to Simon about his days at Peterhouse.

The American children of Peter’s first marriage sat gloomily apart: one leggy sixteen-year-old girl and two younger plump pasty sons in bow ties (“They look,” said Joyce disapprovingly, “as if they haven’t been brought up on home-cooked food”). Vera tried to fuss over them, magisterial in a white blouse with a tie neck and a dark skirt whose waistband rode up on her round high stomach, but they looked at her as if she were an eccentric stranger. Although she had talked endlessly about her grandchildren across the Atlantic — how clever they were, what opportunities they had, what a lovely home — in truth she hardly knew them. She gave herself up instead to basking in the attentions of her son. She forgave any number of missed birthdays, scrawled postcards from exotic holidays, and expensive gifts sent as substitutes for visits, when he walked with her around his guests, his arm around her shoulder, almost as if she were his bride. (Meanwhile the actual bride took her uncomfortable turn with her recalcitrant stepchildren.) There had been some talk of inviting Dick to the wedding. His second wife had died of breast cancer and now he was married again to a nurse he had met at the hospital; they were both retired and lived in the country. Peter and his mother were adamant, though, that he was not to be forgiven, even though Joyce and Ann pointed out that the thing he was not to be forgiven for was more or less what Peter was doing to his first wife now.

Ann said she wanted to talk to Simon about John Donne.

— I knew his poems by heart once. I used to recite them in the street.

— Really?

— Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee.… The lying toad. He is, of course, almost certainly weary of her. But then you’re young so you don’t know about that.

Her cream crèpe-de-chine dress was made up to look like something Edwardian, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and rows of tiny buttons up to the elbow and up the side of the high neck. Although she had a round belly and a waddle when she walked, her dainty hands and feet and small sharp face were still pretty as a quick-eyed little creature, a marmoset. Her dark hair was permed into a mass of curls.

— Haven’t you two got anything stronger than tobacco? My kids are driving me berserk. Sophie wanted to be a bridesmaid, can you believe, and is still sulking. I was hoping we could escape to the grotto for a secret smoke. Did you know there was a grotto? It’s supposed to be divine. Now I’m forty, the only chance I get to carry on with beautiful young men is likely to be by stealing them from my niece.

Simon smiled warily.

— A grotto sounds interesting, he said.

Zoe, going in search of more drink, bumped into Ray, looking huntedly around him.

— Is your mother anywhere in sight? D’you think I can get away with a quick cigar? Just one of these little ones?

— She’s with the caterers. You’re probably OK. Why don’t you come and talk to me and Simon?

— Oh, he’s much too stringently intellectual for me.

— Dad, I wish the two of you would get on. He hates this kind of phony occasion just like you do.

— Who says I hate it? I’m having a wonderful time. Our transatlantic cousin is one of my favorite people. Not only that but I’m hoping he’s going to be one of my customers, now he’s moving home. He buys contemporary art, you know. Of course this is hardly the New York market, but at least we’re cheaper. He’ll buy Frisch; he’ll certainly buy Frisch, he’ll love it. Anyway, what’s your friend got to complain about? Free booze, free grub, good music? Why the hell isn’t he enjoying himself?

— Don’t call him that: “my friend.” His name’s Simon.

— It would be. How sure I was that he couldn’t be a Wayne or a Terry. You’ve let me down, Zo. I was counting on you to bring home someone vulgar and unsuitable, just to see the look on your mother’s face. We’ll have to see what Daniel can do. I’m quite hopeful, actually, in that respect. I think the purple hair is a promising sign.

By the time Zoe found a half-full bottle she had lost Simon, and then she spotted him making his way down between two tall hedges in search of the grotto. She had been drinking champagne on an empty stomach and felt dizzy and desperate.

— Do you hate them all? she asked, when she caught up with him.

— Don’t be silly, he said. Don’t exaggerate.

— I know what you think. They all put on such an act. They make such a display of enjoying themselves. It’s all so false and so materialistic.

— You don’t, actually, have any idea what I think.

— My dad’s different. He’s serious about what he does. You do like his paintings? (She had shown him that morning around the ones hung on the walls at home; he hadn’t commented.)

He shrugged.

— No, not much.

This was a hard blow; she had counted on his admiring them, taking them to stand for what was deep and true as everybody else always had. She struggled to smile and keep her composure, but her face was stinging and her eyes were watering as if he’d actually struck her. She was caught out in her own unexamined enthusiasm, exposed and curling up.

— Oh, don’t you? she said, trying to sound blithe and mildly surprised. I’m very fond of them. Perhaps you need to get to know them better.

— I doubt it. I can see exactly what they are. I just think figurative painting’s bankrupt. A dead language. There’s nothing left for it to say. The visual arts — whatever mess they’re in — have left behind that kind of simplistic confidence in representing the real.

For one electrifying split second, Zoe could imagine how it might be to hate Simon. It was like a white fizz, a surge of light from the back of her mind in which everything looked different: his absorbed frown, deciding at a fork in the path which way to take; his slouching step in his sloppy espadrilles; his rudeness to her family; his immovable calm certainty that she was wrong. She pierced through, just for that second, into a deep dark reservoir of protest, agitated and incoherent. Then she pulled herself back from the brink of it, remembering how she needed him for her happiness. She trotted penitently after him down the path, reminding herself of how much she wanted to be part of the purity and consistency in his way of looking at things. The changes that hurt her most were the ones that made her strong. If need be she would unlearn her taste for her father’s paintings too; she knew she could do that, do it easily.

But the moment’s shock left a little tender place, a chill of hurt.

* * *

Peter and rose were staying, and all the close family came back to the house for tea or more drinks except Vera, who had been dropped off at her flat to rest, and the stepchildren, who had escaped, to everyone’s relief, to “check the place out for a bit.” Zoe and Simon disappeared upstairs to her room, which was also a relief. Joyce felt tense under the reproach of Simon’s coolly scrutinizing look; as if there weren’t enough things for her to be worrying over! (She hadn’t even had time yet to think, How dare he disapprove? What does he know about us?)

— He’s very gorgeous, Zoe’s chap, Ann said. Very sexy. And terrifyingly intelligent. But not much sense of humor.

While Joyce organized tea, Peter brought the wedding presents in from the car and heaped them on the big pine kitchen table.

— Open, open, open up, chanted Ann. We want to see what you got.

— Isn’t this supposed to be a decorous occasion, when Rose makes a list of who we need to thank for what?

— Spoilsport!

— OK then, I capitulate! Get ripping!

Rose did in fact make a list.

— Jesus God, what are we supposed to do with these? They look like instruments to procure an abortion.

— Oh, look, multicolored tumblers in little wicker baskets! Aren’t they just frightful?

— Frightful as fuck. Who were they from?

— Pasta maker, pasta maker. You’ve got two pasta makers.

— His and hers! So we can each make our own spaghetti.

— I’ll bet on a minimum thirty-six crystal goblets. People always give crystal goblets. There were definitely some crystal goblet givers there today.

— But we hate crystal goblets.

— Well, you’re going to have to find some way to learn to live with them. Lots and lots of them.

— I told you you should have had a wedding list.

— Oh, but Joycey, wedding lists are so infra dig.

— Open ours, open ours, clamored Ann. If you don’t appreciate it I’m going to have it back.

Ray and Joyce gave them a painting. Peter and Rose got genuinely very excited about this. It was a smallish dark painting of a man slumped in a chair with his back turned, leaning his head on his hand, his elbow propped on his knee.

— I did suggest, said Joyce, that it wasn’t exactly a weddingy subject.

— But it’s just how Ray feels about weddings, isn’t it! Say the word “wedding” to Ray, and that’s precisely the posture of his inner man.

— I don’t know if I was thinking about weddings in particular, said Ray, giving the painting a careless wary glance. It’s just the usual kind of existential angst. I thought you might enjoy it.

— It’s fantastic! Absolutely fantastic. I love it. I’m going to love to live with this guy.

— Me too, said Rose.

Joyce felt hollowed out with hospitality. Peter insisted that she lie down. He put his arm round her to escort her to her bedroom and called her “sweet coz” and thanked her for organizing everything so wonderfully, whispering in her ear so that his hot breath tickled her. She couldn’t forgive him, though, for refusing to invite his father. She knew how much Dick had wanted to come. Peter was obstinate; there was something self-preening in how he cultivated and clung to his childhood hurt.

Joyce put her dress on a hanger and lay down on the bed in her silk dressing gown embroidered with poppies. It was early evening; the thin white cheesecloth curtains drawn across the open windows swelled and lifted in the breeze, making squares of reflected light swim on the wall. Dick often came to see Joyce; she had visited him and Ruth in their cottage. Whenever he came he brought presents: his homemade wine (which Joyce had to save for parties because Ray wouldn’t touch it), bundles of old silver teaspoons bought at a sale, newspaper parcels of runner beans or sweet peas from his garden. Joyce couldn’t help basking in his rusty old charm. If he took her out for lunch he pulled out her chair and helped her off with her coat, so that she felt taken care of. No doubt there was a great deal of delusion in it. No doubt the women who had lived most intimately with him had reason to resent the lightness and sweetness he could make when he chose. Joyce knew for herself how the thirst for lightness and sweetness could lead you into twisted snarled-up ways.

She almost slept; at least her thoughts floated some little way above the bed, although she couldn’t let go of the busy responsibility that had stretched her thin all day, the worry over all the ones who needed to be placated and appeased and looked out for. Fran, Ray’s sister, was a widow of six months and, although she was a hearty sensible creature, was bound to be stricken and sorry at a wedding. Martin and Ingrid still weren’t pregnant. Frisch had come with a new girl, and Joyce had had to judge delicately the degree of friendliness to show toward her, considering how very recently she had been friendly to the one displaced. A good friend of Joyce’s from the days of the craft cooperative (her brother had been at school with Peter) told her over lunch that her breast cancer had come back; hard to believe when she looked so radiantly well. And even as Joyce dozed she couldn’t help her high-strung nerves tuning in to any possibility of raised voices, in case it was Ray and Daniel picking another fight over nothing. It had been a mistake, Daniel’s coming back to live with them after his band split up and his flat fell through and Joyce had had to nurse him through a bad night when he’d mixed his drugs. Ray couldn’t bear it that Daniel didn’t know what he wanted to do next.

Joyce opened her eyes and came wide awake and thought with clarity while she followed the line of a crack across the ceiling how much she would have liked to talk about all this with Zoe. Wasn’t that what mothers and daughters were supposed to do? Wouldn’t she have loved more than anything to tell Lil? She had been so busy — today, yesterday, this month, last year — she had probably let slip precious opportunities for making contact with her now-grown-up child. Zoe and Simon had missed out earlier on their tea. If she took up to Zoe’s room a tray with three cups and slices of Ann’s cake (full of brandy), perhaps they would let her in and she could tell them funny stories from the day, confide in them about her difficulties. Simon’s silence might turn out to be only the insecurity of youth.

Joyce had made up the packaway bed for Simon yesterday, although she had known he wasn’t likely to sleep in it. It had seemed a strange thing even so, to prepare a bed for a man in the room full of Zoe’s childish possessions, her teddy and favorite doll still on her white cotton bedspread, her storybooks muddled in with her A-level texts on the shelves in the alcove, her china animals on her treasure shelf. When Zoe first moved into the room years ago, she and Joyce had decorated it in blue and white; Joyce made blue curtains and covered the bedside table in blue, with a white fringe glued around it. On the wall were pictures Zoe had made on holiday in Wales out of shells picked up on a beach and an appliqué snowman Joyce sewed for her when she was a baby, with snowflakes in cross-stitching.

She pictured herself taking up the tea and cake and hearing from behind the closed door a quality of silence — paused and creaking, taut with held breath — which would make it impossible to knock. Or she would knock and say there was tea and Zoe would say muffledly, OK, she’d fetch it in a minute, and Joyce would have to carry the third cup downstairs with her again, so that they wouldn’t even know she’d tactlessly tried.

* * *

Zoe had had sex twice before she went up to cambridge, but those hadn’t been very happy experiences, both at parties, both drunk, one of them outside up against a wall, the boy seeming exasperated with her for her incompetence at managing what had surely been a near-impossible physical contortion, into which pleasure couldn’t imaginably have entered. She had decided that she was not going to be very good at this kind of thing. Therefore she had gone to her first few university social occasions expecting to be a shy observer, unnoticed and wondering and perhaps, if she could rise to it, somewhat ironic.

It was probably because she had thought herself more or less invisible that she had allowed herself to stare at Simon Macy. Josh, who was kind, had invited a first-year friend of Zoe’s to a party at his house, and she had begged Zoe to go with her so that she would have someone to walk back to college with afterward. Zoe hadn’t even realized when she agreed that Simon lived there, although she certainly hadn’t forgotten who he was; from time to time in those first weeks she had caught sight of him, each glimpse like a jolt of longing — unappeasable longing, she was quite clear about that — grounding itself through her. There was something in the particular combination of his nervous fine-boned features with his dark hair, and his absorbed obliviousness with his confidence, that answered exactly to her idea of a desirable male and set him apart in romance from all the other students. The romance thickened when the weather sharpened in November and she saw him in an old Oxfam-shop fur coat, the collar turned up around a lean face pinched and bruise-colored with cold. She knew perfectly — crushingly — well that she wasn’t alone in any of this. Loads of girls liked Simon Macy.

At the party she sat inconspicuously on the edge of a group of people she didn’t know, drinking mouthfuls of warm rioja from a plastic cup. She hadn’t dressed up, even that would have been presumptuous; as if anyone was likely to look at her. She was wearing her comfortable cords and her desert boots and an old navy V-neck sweater she used to wear to school, and her hair was tied back. She had, in honor of the party, fastened it with a blue ribbon. There were a couple of really beautiful girls there — one of them, she learned later, was Trina — with their eyes elaborately painted, wearing old 1930s dresses that showed off their silky curves. They were dancing and performing at the center of things; literally, they seemed to be acting out scenes from some play they had been in together at school. Watching them and swallowing down the rioja, Zoe felt sad, as if this was the youth that books and poetry celebrated and she was shut out from it by something helplessly prosaic in her constitution. At the same time, she couldn’t have wanted to be them; finally, there seemed to her something foolish and exposing in how they presumed upon admiring male attention.

Zoe had known Simon was there as soon as she arrived. He wasn’t in the room constantly, he came in and out (this was his habit at parties, she learned afterward). Once he came back eating an apple, once with his finger in a book, as if he had been distracted from reading in another room. The party, it was clear, was not quite enough for him. His only whole-hearted participation was when he sat cross-legged to roll another joint, tearing papers and strewing tobacco on the back of an LP cover (Velvet Underground).

At some point he was gone again and she didn’t see him come back in, and then with a scalding stir of adjustment she was aware that he was standing right beside where she sat. She was intimately close to his long bony feet with the big toes turned crookedly outward; she could have touched them with her hand. Then he dropped to squat beside her, offering her the joint. She would have accepted it, just so as not to seem like a stodgy little first-year, only she was afraid she’d choke and make a worse fool of herself.

— No, I don’t take it, she said idiotically, shaking her head.

— Oh, don’t you? He laughed. What do you take?

— Nothing, really, apart from this horrible wine.

— I meant, what subject do you take? If you are a student? Are you?

— I’m at your college, she said. I do history.

— That’s just what I would have guessed. You look calm and factual.

— Oh, dear. That’s probably exactly what I am. I was actually — just then — thinking about the medieval Italian banking system.

— The medieval Italian banking system! He seemed pleased with that, settling back to sit with his arms around his knees. You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime. I’m fascinated.

She was dizzy at the idea that he imagined they might have further conversation in the future.

— But you haven’t been thinking about medieval banking systems all evening. You were watching me.

— Oh, no! Zoe flushed guiltily. I’ve been watching everybody. I don’t really know anyone here.

— Don’t be embarrassed. I really thought you were. Every time I glanced up, you were looking at me.

Dumbly she shook her head.

— Not really.

— I thought you’d like it if I came over to talk.

— Well, I do like it. If you don’t mind.

— How did you know, anyway, which college I’m at?

— I’ve seen you around.

— You see? You have been watching!

This time she shook her head, not meeting his eyes, but smiling.

— Everybody knows you.

— No, they don’t. Not as well as you do.

— I don’t know you at all, she said sensibly.

— Well, would you like to?

She simply nodded.

And that was when he touched her for the first time: transferring the nearly smoked end of the joint to his left hand very deliberately, slipping his right hand under her thin wool sweater, and running it lightly around her waist until he found the top of her hipbone, pressing in against the bone under the waistband of her trousers. It was the deliberateness that undid and dissolved her when she replayed this moment of his choosing her afterward, over and over: the idea of his consciously coolly initiating their crossing over from talk into sex, not waiting to fumble into it later in the dark or through drink. His fingers were cool, though not cold; she could feel his long tapering fingertips and longish nails, and she was seized, just from this touch, by an excitement she certainly hadn’t felt those times with the other boys, although she knew something like it from occasions alone and dreaming. Disoriented because her dreaming desires had impossibly erupted into actual life, she sat amid the noise and chaos of the party in stillness and a kind of hallucinatory ease, as if like Alice in Wonderland she had grown larger than the room, looking around with eyes that saw everything and nothing.

She learned afterward that Simon’s touching her was always his preliminary to sex. In between times, he didn’t like any physical contact: he didn’t want her to kiss him or put her arms around him, he never held hands with her when they were walking together. Also, they were never to talk at other times about what they did in bed. Once Zoe had adjusted to all this, she didn’t mind it; she too came to feel that all that pawing and clinging to each other that other couples went in for was cloying and infantile; their sentimentalities and spilled-over confidences were a kind of rubbish that might contaminate what was real, which must be kept clear and utterly private.

When Simon took her to his bed that first time, while the party was still going on downstairs (her friend after all had to walk back to college on her own), she was so afraid that she shook while he undressed her and hoped he didn’t notice it. All longing had died down in her, and she only hoped the thing would be quickly over with and she would acquit herself without disgrace. Judging from her previous experiences, she supposed her role in the business would be primarily to be accommodating and instrumental, so she was taken aback and dismayed when, kneeling beside her in the near dark (he had spread out his duvet on the floor in the light of the gas fire), he turned his attentions to touching her with no sign of the urgency or male peremptory haste that she remembered. She had thought of these touchings as solitary secrets, or perhaps as teenage substitutions for the “real thing”: in the first moments she was so shy she tried to stop him, kept her legs together and twisted away from him onto her side, hugging her knees childishly. Then naturally as he persisted she forgot herself, and uncurled, and opened her legs, and lost herself, and even forgot, sooner or later, that this was him; and then she wasn’t afraid — although she was astonished and wincing at it afterward — of showing herself to him, greedy and inventive and exposed.

The next afternoon, even though she told herself brutally that he probably often did what he’d done to girls at parties and that it did not mean he would want any further connection with her, she cycled over from college, rang the doorbell until Marty let her in, picked her way through a deep disorder of bottles and beer cans and stale overflowing ashtrays — in that house the mess from parties was never really cleared up, it was just allowed to wear away with time — and presented herself with a thudding heart in Simon’s room. He was working. He made her wait while he finished; she sat on his bed in absolute silence for two hours while he typed, scribbled, opened up books and read absorbedly, sighed, wrapped his hand tightly in his hair in the intensity of his concentration, scribbled, typed again. She wondered sometimes afterward whether this had been a test, which she had passed. Even when he wound the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter, she was afraid he might send her away. But he didn’t. In a restless afternoon dusk — cars plowing home on the wet road outside, lights sliding across the ceiling, the door locked, the others rousing out of their beds and shouting round the house and, once, knocking — they began again (only it was always each time different) what they had left off the night before.

It was this devoted attentiveness of his to sex that she thought of as her great good luck. Each time when they came to touching she felt a little beat of fear that he might frown and make his face of fastidious dismissal and deplore the importance that she placed upon it. But he never let her down. Each time it was a blessed dispensation, that with a serious face and rapt attention he applied himself to making love to her with all his intelligence and grace.