Everything Will Be All Right

Seven

Zoe could imagine having a child but not a baby. The child when she imagined it was a tiny elflike thing, her spirit companion, playful, laughing, looking at her with dark eyes full of knowingness. But she realized there was an intermediate phase before knowingness was possible, and that was a kind of blank to her. She couldn’t think what you would do with a baby all day.

That autumn when she was pregnant she was working three afternoons a week in a shop across the road from the entrance to the maternity hospital. She wasn’t very busy. It was a shop that sold handbags and luggage, and the customers were occasional and took a long time choosing. So she was often looking out of the windows across at the hospital when one of the new mothers came out and got into her husband’s car to be driven home for the first time. The mother would be followed by a nurse, ceremonially carrying the baby wrapped in a bundle of white shawls; the nurse would hand it to the mother when she was safely in the passenger seat. If Zoe tried to convince herself that she would one day soon have a bundle of white shawls of her own, what she pictured wrapped up inside it was something like a mouse or a kitten, something soft and mewling and tender, but remote.

Simon and Zoe didn’t have a car. She supposed she would take a taxi home with her baby. This would be just another way in which she was unlike the other women she met at the prenatal classes, unlikenesses that made her feel lacking and yet at the same time aloof, privately cherishing the original way she and Simon had of doing things. She supposed she would get in the taxi on her own, with her baby. When she arrived back at the little house they rented in the Kite, she didn’t know whether Simon would be waiting there for them. He might choose to go on one of his long walks that day or to be working on his thesis in the university library. He hadn’t wanted a baby. She had pretended that her pregnancy was an accident (the truth was, it was something between an accident and deliberate; she had left off her cap when she couldn’t quickly find it on one occasion, not knowing whether she hoped she would get away with it or hoped she wouldn’t). Even so, he hadn’t wanted it; he had said they should find a doctor to get rid of it. But she had left it too late for that before she told him.

The arrival of the baby still seemed far off. She swelled up and was in love with the extraordinary shape of herself in the bath, and then with the baby leaping and jumping inside her, but the days ticked by very dawdlingly toward the date they had given her at the hospital. They had fine weather that autumn: skies like old watercolors, powder blue with tall ragged white clouds; the massive city trees bronzing and crisping at the edges; the spires and turrets of the colleges sharp gray pencil lines against the air. She cycled between her jobs (as well as at the handbag shop, she worked one day a week on a greengrocer’s stall in the market and two evenings and Sunday mornings as a barmaid at the Portland Arms), standing up on her left pedal when she took off from the curb, glancing behind her and scooting off with her right foot like a real Cambridge lady-habituée, proud that she was strong and capable and that her pregnancy made no difference to her. (She cycled into the hospital the very day before she had the baby.) She pitied and was privately skeptical of the ones who moaned about backache and tiredness.

Unlike the other women at the classes, she hadn’t got everything ready. That was what they said to one another: “Have you got everything ready?” as if having a baby were a household routine like preparing a room or packing to go away on holiday. Zoe knew from novels that a new baby could sleep in a pulled-out drawer at first, as long as it was lined with soft blankets. She held off contemptuously from those practicalities that turned the baby’s arrival into another dreary opportunity for consumerism, for discussions of the purchase of prams or sterilizers or washing machines. (Her mother had washed all the nappies by hand, so she was sure she could do the same.) She changed nothing in the house, and she and Simon didn’t talk about what was coming. They made love from behind because her huge stomach got in the way; but still they didn’t actually ever mention the baby after that first terrible week of his cold furious insistence and her stubbornness, resisting him.

It was not quite true that she had made no preparations at all. At the back of the drawer where she kept her sweaters and shirts she had a little cache of baby clothes: some tiny white vests and socks her mother had sent, two little woolly coats knitted by her grandmother, a couple of secondhand Babygro suits she had bought herself from a charity shop because they looked clean and pretty and hardly used. She had blushed when she was paying for them because in spite of her big annunciatory bump she didn’t really feel she was one of the grown-up women who had the right to possess such items. Sometimes when Simon wasn’t in the house she got these things out from the drawer and unfolded them, frowning as she tried to imagine what kind of tiny creature might be fitted inside them.

* * *

And then she was on a trolley being wheeled somewhere and she was looking into Pearl’s eyes and Pearl was looking back into hers. This was not any baby she could ever have imagined herself having. It wasn’t mouselike or curled up or tender at all; it had huge strained-open eyes of dark night blue, staring at Zoe with something like the same indignant awareness of outrage and violation with which Zoe must have been staring back at her.

What was that? The mutual accusation seemed to bounce backward and forward between them. What did that to me?

The last few hours of history still seemed as loud around them as a battle, the blazing assaults of pain, the drama of doors slamming and feet running in the race to the delivery room, Zoe’s noisy vomiting into a kidney bowl, her shouting out numbers at the top of her voice, counting through her contractions. She couldn’t wait to tell her women friends never, ever, to be tempted to put themselves through this; it was much more terrible than anyone could imagine in advance. (Needless to say she quickly forgot it, in her absorption in her new life with the baby.)

— You’ve been so good, the student midwife said, squeezing her round the shoulders.

But this baby didn’t care for any of that.

Its hair was not nestling fur but a tall gingery crest. Its nose was broad with flaring nostrils. Its mouth was fat with flat squashed lips, an angry purplish red, downturned at the ends with dissatisfaction.

— Who are you? she whispered to it as they were hurried, staring at each other, down to the ward on the trolley. Where did you come from?

She knew in those first moments that this baby was never going to grow into any elf creature or spirit companion. Actually, she knew in the same moments that the spirit companion had been a silly idea. As if your child could be just a broken-off piece of yourself. Real things were always more tremendous — more unhinging — than the things that grew out of your own thoughts. Perhaps the only thing left over from the dream child was her name. Zoe clung to that, as if to attach to this new creature just a small something of her own, a memory of the wild child from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, which she had studied at A-level: Pearl absorbed on the shore in her games with the weed and the shells, loving but free.

* * *

The week that pearl was born, simon was away giving a paper at a conference in Manchester. He hadn’t left a telephone number. Zoe lied on the phone to her mother and said that although he hadn’t been able to get back in time for the birth, he had seen the baby since and picked her up out of her little cot of transparent plastic and held her. She also lied that it was Simon who had first pointed out what now was obvious, that the baby looked like her, like Joyce. Joyce wondered, but vaguely, if she should come up and see them. Zoe, who so wanted her to come, said firmly that it would be a better idea if she gave them a few weeks to settle into their new routine.

The lying to her mother was something new (Zoe usually scrupulously told the truth); it was something that had come about in the rush of change and bloodiness and her attention focused with the nurses on her bodily functions, as if she had lost track for a moment of her higher self. But the hard-edged gap between mother and daughter, narrow but deep, which both dissimulated with bright capable voices, wasn’t new. Zoe would have liked to talk with Joyce about feeding the baby and about nappies, but Joyce’s vagueness warned her off; she remembered their truce of skeptical disapproval, how each politely withheld their verdict on the other. Zoe thought she could guess what her mother thought of her life with Simon; she could imagine her making a funny story to her friends out of how they lived on black coffee and bread and cheese, without a washing machine or an electric kettle, and with a bathtub in the kitchen; how they spent their money on books and music instead of furniture; how when Joyce and Ray came to visit, Zoe had forgotten that they would need spare sheets.

When Zoe had first told Joyce she was pregnant, she had had a sentimental idea that this would lead to a moment of closeness between them, but Joyce at the other end of the phone had seemed shocked and even irritated.

— What about your PhD? she had asked, as if she was actually disappointed, although she hadn’t ever shown much interest in it before. (Zoe, anyway, was convinced that the subject she had chosen to work on — the effects of prewar government education policies on responses to conscription in the First World War — was the wrong one. She struggled on with it, and had folders full of notes and a card index of references, but she found it hard to imagine ever writing it up. She persuaded herself it was more important for her to bring in money so that Simon could write his.)

— Oh, I can pick that up later. At the moment, anyway, it’s not practical for both of us to be studying at the same time.

— But is Simon going to be able to bring in an income to support you while you’re at home looking after the baby?

Zoe had sighed deeply.

— Mum, this isn’t what I want to be talking about, not right now, not when I’ve just told you something important.

— I’m sorry, I can’t quite take it in, that’s all. All the implications.

* * *

— It’s a girl, joyce said to ray, after zoe telephoned from the hospital. She’s going to call it Pearl.

She hesitated in the kitchen doorway as if she didn’t know where to go with the news. It was just after breakfast; Ray was reading the paper and drinking coffee at the big pine table. He took off his reading glasses.

— Good God. Pearl Deare. Sounds like something out of music hall.

— But I suppose it will be Macy.

— So we’re grandparents.

— I can’t believe that, said Joyce. I’m not ready for it. I don’t feel like a grandmother.

— We could just go, said Ray. I’ll fill up the car and check the tires; you throw some things in a bag. We’ll drive. It won’t take more than five or six hours on the motorway. We’ll book into a hotel somewhere in Cambridge.

— I don’t know how to contact her, said Joyce.

— We don’t need to, we just turn up. We know which hospital it is.

— I was seeing Ingrid for lunch tomorrow.

— Cancel her. She’ll understand.

— I’d need to have a bath and wash my hair.

— Run it in while you start to pack. I’ll ring Ingrid.

Joyce put the plug in the bath and turned on the hot tap. Slowly she moved about her bedroom, listening to the tub fill up, pulling out the drawers, walking into the built-in wardrobe and running her hand along the hangers, some outfits still in their dry-cleaners’ bags. Nothing seemed right. She didn’t like anything she had. What could one possibly choose to wear on such an occasion? She pulled out her good gray wool crepe skirt and matching jacket with padded shoulders, but that might be too hot in a hospital, and it would crumple on the journey, and she remembered that the last time she wore it the skirt was uncomfortably tight. There were some black silky trousers that were always comfortable, but the material had gone cheap and snagged if you looked up close, and anyway she had a sudden fear that her thighs looked fat in them, like a barroom tart. She took down one thing after another and threw them on the bed.

Ray found her standing naked in the bathroom. She was staring in the mirror, which she had wiped clear of steam with a towel. The water was almost at the top of the tub.

— What is all this about?

— Do I look like a grandmother?

— So that’s what it is. You could have a been a grandmother at thirty-six. Some women are. It doesn’t mean anything.

— But I’m not. I’m not thirty-six.

— You have the most beautiful body. Look at you. As beautiful as ever. I can’t resist the sight of you.

— You’re not enough, she said.

— I see. He looked crestfallen, resigned.

— Don’t be silly. I meant, you’re married to me, therefore it doesn’t count. It only counts from strangers. Only strangers see whether you look like a grandmother or not. Whether you’re someone they could want to make love to.

— So that’s why you don’t want to go and visit Zoe’s baby.

— She doesn’t want me anywhere near it, either. You know what they think of me. They think I’m a bourgeois housewife. They think all I care about is shopping and decorating.

— You’re almost certainly making all this up, he said.

— Maybe.

— We won’t go. It can wait. We’ll go when you’re ready.

He put his arms around her from behind; in the mirror, the sleeves of his suede jacket were brutal against her soft nakedness.

— Manet, he said. Déjeuner dans la salle de bain.

* * *

Other friends came to visit zoe in the hospital and saw pearl before Simon did. Probably some of the mothers on the ward thought Joshua was her husband, because he came in to see her twice at that hour when the husbands came (some alone and devoted, with flowers and lots of gazing into the crib; some with older children, being jolly with the new baby while the mother made up to the others, laughing at the clothes they were dressed in, asking what their father had been feeding them). Zoe was Mrs. Macy on the nameplate above the bed, the midwife had warned her of untold complications if she used her unmarried surname, so she had amusedly agreed to it. She didn’t however lie about this; she told the women who had become her friends in the beds to either side of her that she wasn’t married, that she and her boyfriend didn’t believe in it, that he was away and she hadn’t been able to contact him.

Joshua didn’t really make a very satisfactory husband substitute; he still wore his hair long and had a straggling beard and traipsed around in an old greatcoat, with a plastic carrier bag in which he kept his poems. He had got only low marks in his finals but seemed to find it impossible to leave Cambridge, so he took on small gardening or typing jobs and rented a dank basement room lit with a 40-watt bulb to save money. Zoe dreaded his visiting her at home because he stayed talking about books and music for hours, and if it was raining outside he took off his socks without asking and wrung them out and hung them to steam in front of the fire. Still, it was sweet of him to come to the hospital, and he got very excited about Pearl, holding her as if she were a particularly slippery kind of fish, adjusting his body position contortedly to her slightest stirrings. He asked if Zoe was planning to educate her at home and suggested that, if so, he could teach her Latin as part of a balanced curriculum. She looked forward more to visits from her friend who was a postgraduate at Churchill, and from the manageress at the bag shop, who brought her some baby sleep-suits Zoe was very grateful for. (She was beginning to wonder anxiously what she was going to do at home about the limited supply of baby clothes; they seemed to get wet and dirtied so quickly.)

None of these visitors from outside really seemed part of Zoe’s new life with the baby; she felt much closer to some of the other mothers. In the bed to her right was a good-looking blond woman with a hairdressing business. She had tried for a baby for eight years and then given up and started her business instead; just when it was really taking off she had discovered she was pregnant. She said she had cried every day of her pregnancy. Now she lay gazing in worship through the side of the transparent cot at her tiny son, although she still had no idea how she was going to manage looking after him. In the bed to Zoe’s left was a dumpy woman with a pudding-basin haircut who had three children already; they came in with her husband, who worked in haulage and wore a shiny suit to the hospital. Zoe was deeply impressed with this woman’s quiet competence at soothing and feeding her baby and managing the older ones. She confided tearfully, however, after her family had gone, that she hadn’t wanted more children but her husband wouldn’t let her use any contraceptives. Indignantly, Zoe and the hairdresser took her part.

— It’s your body, said the hairdresser. It’s you who has to go through that torture.

— Don’t get me wrong, said the woman. I will love the baby. But there’s no room for another one, and I’ve got no washing machine. And I’d just started at a little job of my own, which I won’t be able to manage now with her.

Zoe confessed to them about how she had accidentally on purpose lost her cap and not mentioned it to Simon. She was very moved by her intimacy with these women and by what seemed to her their quiet heroism (everything in those hormone-heady few days was heightened). She thought how glad she was to get away from everything associated with the university: she felt as though she was recovering in a grateful rush her conviction of how deep and complex and sustaining people’s lives were outside the lit circle of intellectual thought.

On the last day of the week she spent in the hospital, Simon came. It wasn’t even visiting hours; the Sister pursued him down the ward and wanted to send him away but relented when he shrugged and charmed her with what Zoe could tell was his mock-courteous, most exaggeratedly upper-class manner. People responded to this presumption of authority in him as part of his disconcerting physical appeal: he was tall and very thin, and his hair these days was cut so short it was like moleskin against his scalp, flickering with the change of his facial expressions. Zoe was changing Pearl’s nappy on the bed; Pearl was squirming and crying. Until she was aware of Simon coming down the ward toward her, Zoe had been dealing quite calmly with this, tucking under and pulling tight, with her fingers inside to safely guide the pin as she had been shown by the nurses, knowing she could calm her down afterward with feeding. When she saw Simon her hands were suddenly hot and fumbling, and the nappy fell open, so that when he came up to the bed he saw the whole raw little body, quivering and flailing in its distress, with the long slit up between its legs and the big plastic clip on its cord, which was drying out (nicely, the nurses said) into a greenish stump. The huge night-blue eyes fixed balefully upon Simon, and the baby’s whole head suffused with blood as she redoubled the intensity of her squalling.

Zoe knew that he was thinking the baby was ugly.

— So it’s a girl.

— It’s Pearl.

— Pearl Deare? That’s ridiculous. It sounds like a wartime cabaret singer.

— Not Deare. Pearl Macy. I thought she’d have your name. Officially.

— Officially? I see that officially you’ve taken my name too. (How had her nameplate caught his eye so quickly? She had been going to take it down when she knew he was coming in.) Is there some conspiracy to implicate me here?

He sounded as if he was joking, but she knew he wasn’t.

— The midwife said it would make things easier.

— I’ll bet she did.

— Anyway: how are you? she said brightly, trying to carry on with the nappy as if it were something ordinary to her. How did the paper go?

He shook his head in irritation at her transparent effort to distract him. He didn’t want to talk about that here. Looking around at the scene of shapeless swollen women in their nightclothes, some reading magazines, some staring dotingly into their cots, some dozing (the Sister pulled curtains around the ones who were nursing, because a man was present), a tiny spasm of distaste tightened a muscle in his cheek. Zoe imagined that the ward smelled offensively: of milk, of baby excrement, of women’s blood, of disinfectant and hospital dinners.

She put Pearl to the breast to feed, to calm her down; but there was something preposterous in doing it in front of Simon, as if this were a show she was putting on for his benefit, an ill-judged attempt at a maternal display. It was not even a very well-prepared show. Pearl wouldn’t latch on to her nipple; she gasped and blubbered and half sucked and then lost her hold in frantic breathlessness, throwing her head from side to side against the breast; she arched her back and shuddered with sobbing and got herself into a worse state than she had ever been in before. Zoe was desperate and sweating, with her distended breast exposed. The nurses had to come and help, swirling the curtains around her bed behind them to cover her shame.

In the middle of this scene, Simon turned around and left.

It was Carol from Churchill who arranged to come to the hospital at lunchtime the next day with a friend who had a car, to pick up Zoe and Pearl and drive them home.

* * *

Joyce and ray sent a check for two hundred pounds toward things for the baby. Zoe bought a pram and a cot secondhand from the Spastics shop, a bag for her nappy-changing equipment, and a plastic changing mat; she spent the rest on an automatic washing machine, which she had plumbed in to the little covered yard at the back of their terraced cottage.

The washing machine made life remarkably much easier. In fact, before she bought it, Zoe simply hadn’t been coping with the amount of housework to do. Simon would take a bag of their clothes down to the launderette every week or so, as he always had, but she never gave him anything of the baby’s, so that in the evenings (Pearl’s best time for sleeping) Zoe found herself at the kitchen sink looking out of the window into the dark yard — or at her own blurry reflection, hunched and desperate — rubbing through the little sleepsuits and Babygros and plastic pants and cardigans and muslin wiping cloths (also her own bloodied knickers for the first couple of weeks), while the nappies boiled in a pan on the gas stove, filling the house with a foul steam. Somehow nothing ever came quite clean with handwashing (she supposed it was her inexperience; she was beginning to take in the infinite amount of ordinary things she didn’t properly know how to do); the babysuits were permanently yellowed with spit-up at the neckline or stained on the legs from leaking nappies. She remembered from somewhere to soak her own knickers in salt for the stains before washing them, and that helped; but on the clothes horse in front of the gas fire everything looked dingy and dispiriting, particularly when the rest of the house was such a mess because she hadn’t had time to tidy. Sometimes in the evening the baby bath from the morning, its water cold and scummed with soap and bits of cotton wool, was still sitting on the table waiting for her to empty it.

So she was fervently thankful for the automatic washing machine.

When she had first gone to prenatal classes, they had all been given a little booklet printed on poor-quality paper with information about pregnancy and childbirth and baby care. It was illustrated with old-fashioned line drawings of mother and father and baby in which mother wore a frilly tight-waisted apron and father a tie, and both wore screwball-comedy expressions of mock joy and mock despair as they juggled with their cute cartoon infant. Zoe had despised this booklet at the beginning and almost thrown it away. She had looked at its descriptions of a day with baby and wondered whatever you were supposed to do in the long gaps between the four-hourly feed and change routines. On the list of things to take into hospital with you for the birth had been included eau-de-Cologne, and dutifully, although with no idea what she might need it for, Zoe had acquired a huge cheap bottle of this from Boots. (Years later she still had it, almost full, and the smell of it would bring back overwhelming memories of the maternity ward, the vast baths with thundering hot water where she had soaked her soreness and afterward splashed her neck and arms with the cologne she hadn’t found any other use for, the smell of it mingling with the new strange smell her sweat had in those days after the birth.)

Now, although the booklet was stuffed in the drawer where she kept Pearl’s clothes and where Simon wouldn’t look, Zoe made constant and humbled reference to it, to try and find out what she should do to manage better this new life she found herself inside. Pearl wasn’t what they called a “good” baby. This was the first question all the new mothers asked when they met at the baby clinic, looking into one another’s prams: “Is yours good?” (Zoe never saw either the hairdresser or the wife of the man in haulage again.) She knew everything was wrong with this; she was repelled by the smug relish of the mothers of the “good” ones, and she could imagine just what Simon would understand about their use of that word “good,” its repressive moralization of any behavior that didn’t fit into a convenient pattern. And yet it was a relief to confess to someone else whose baby, like hers, didn’t sleep in the day and woke up every two hours at night, who was moving like her in a fog of fatigue, falling asleep on her feet doing the washing-up, falling asleep whenever she picked up a book to read. She longed sometimes when things weren’t going well to telephone Joyce and pour out her troubles. Instead, whenever they did speak, she was careful to present herself as coping competently. (“You were such an easy baby,” Joyce had told her. “I never knew what any of the fuss was about.”) They sometimes spoke of the possibility of a visit, but they never fixed a date.

— Whenever you’re ready for us, Joyce said.

— Whenever you can make time, said Zoe.

The thought of other wakeful mothers was consoling when Zoe was walking up and down in Pearl’s room trying to get her to sleep after a night feed (on bad nights she stayed in there on the studio couch because it was pointless to disturb Simon, getting in and out of bed every time Pearl cried). She would be holding her upright against her shoulder the way she liked best, jogging her slightly and rhythmically until her right arm ached, letting her suck on the first knuckle of her left hand. After a while she would feel the alert little body dropping into softness against her, yielding up its conscious awareness, the wet mouth falling away from where it sucked. Without stopping the jogging, Zoe would lower her with slow smooth movements onto the cot, face down, rocking her against the sheet with both hands, gradually lessening and slowing the rocking and taking away the hands, one at a time, hovering ready to pounce back and rock her into sleep again if she roused. Then — silence! — Zoe would creep off to her couch and lie down. The temptation was to lie strained, awake, listening to Pearl breathe, but Zoe knew she could not afford to waste these blessed spaces of peace; she trained herself to fall almost instantly into sleep by running over and over the dates and details of the Education Acts or the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, not testing herself, only moving her mind round and round inside the loop of known things until it fell through and was swallowed up. On bad nights it might be only five or ten or twenty minutes later that she was shocked awake again by Pearl’s hard little cry, vindictive-seeming, full of outrage.

In the old days before Pearl, Zoe had hardly been aware of housework. She and Simon had developed a pattern of minimal engagement with the material substratum of their lives. The vacuum cleaner stood in a corner of the living room and occasionally one of them would plug it in and run it over the floor. In the mornings, whoever was last to leave rinsed through the few dishes in the sink. They cleaned out the ashes of the front-room coal fire when they made a new one. They bought little bits of shopping on their way home from work or the library; they never made a list. They lived on bread and cheese and olives and fruit and biscuits, and sometimes one of them, if in the mood, would cook soup or risotto. Mainly they lived on black coffee, which Simon always bought at one particular delicatessen; he oversaw the details of its making with fastidious care. They were both very thin (the nurses at prenatal had been worried about Zoe); they certainly never avowed thinness as anything they were aiming for (that was for idiots, demeaning), but they had had a disdain for the greedy corporeality which betrayed itself in sweet puddings, second helpings, thickened flesh. The only chore that presented itself as any kind of a burden or obligation was cleaning the toilet, and it was true that they had sometimes neglected this, but Zoe had cleaned it scrupulously before her parents came to stay (that was somehow why she had forgotten to provide them with sheets). Simon and Zoe had never talked together about any of these arrangements or choices; that would have been banal.

Now that she had Pearl, this order of life — in which the material arrangements floated lightly on the periphery and knowledge and books and music were the real dense substance at the center — was completely overturned. Zoe looked back upon the ruins of the old life with astonishment at her innocence then. Had she really believed you could exempt yourself so easily from the grown-up burdens, as if you were children playing house? To begin with, she knew now that she needed to eat. Not only was she hungry, starving hungry, all the time, she knew she must eat to make milk. One weekend when she had neglected to feed herself, her milk had started to fail. Pearl had screamed without stopping all one night, Simon walked out, and the Health Visitor made her go to bed for a couple of days. She had phoned Carol, who came over and cooked her fish pie and rice pudding and sausages and mash and sponge cake.

After that, Zoe knew she had to shop and prepare food properly (although she didn’t really have much idea of how to cook). And of course she could not pop out and do her shopping casually anytime, it was a whole expedition: she had to feed and change and bathe and dress Pearl first, and somehow wash and dress herself (she looked up in the booklet to try and find out what you were supposed to do with the baby at those moments when you needed both your hands). Usually the rocking of the pram in motion put Pearl to sleep while they were out, and this would be the best sleep she had all day. Sometimes when they got back after shopping Zoe would be able to leave her asleep in the pram in the yard while she flew inside to tidy up from the morning’s routine, rinse nappies and put them to soak, start a wash, make the bed, rinse the dishes. Then the hard little cry would come again.

Very early on, lying on her front, Pearl could half raise herself up on her arms when she woke, lifting her head with its gingery crest of hair to peer around for Zoe. If she was in the pram, Zoe could watch for a few moments that veering seeking head that couldn’t support its own weight for long, before Pearl discovered where she was or began to cry. These were moments of eerie quiet, both of them awake but separate, Zoe allowed to see Pearl as she was when she was alone: an instant’s premonition of her daughter’s capacity for life without her, liberating and lacerating at once. Sometimes Zoe hurried to pick her up and restore their tight-wound connection. Then if it was time for a feed (following the booklet, Zoe worked hard to establish these four-hourly), they settled down together in the chair with no arms that was best for nursing, and into a day that was mostly an inchoate mess there would bloom a session of healing calm while the baby sucked.

Zoe wore an old copper bracelet that she changed from wrist to wrist to remind herself which side they had started with last time. After her first urgent hunger was satisfied, Pearl’s hand would begin to wander exploringly across the surface of the breast and her eye would meet Zoe’s gazing down at her. Pearl’s look would heat up warmly, and grinning up at Zoe she would sometimes fall off the nipple, the bluish milk trickling out of her open mouth down Zoe’s front.

* * *

Simon didn’t watch the feeding, even when he was in the house. Mostly, he was out: at the market (he had taken over Zoe’s old job on the greengrocer’s stall) or at the library, with friends, or supervising students (he did some at home and some in a room in college). It was as if after the birth the house split into separate domains, his space in the front room, where he often didn’t bother to make a fire but sat in the cold, reading or typing or playing records; her space in the mess of the kitchen and living room with the gas fire on and the clothes horse laden with wet clothes or nappies steaming. If she had cooked he ate at the table with her and they exchanged polite information about their respective days, but he didn’t finish what she put on his plate: she tried putting less and less, but he never finished it. If he had a bath in the kitchen he pulled the curtain across.

In the middle of the night when Pearl was about a month old, Simon had reached out for Zoe in the dark. She had just climbed back into their bed after feeding Pearl and putting her down to sleep again. She lay huddled away from him; he put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed up and down her back. It was the first time he’d touched her deliberately since she’d come back from the hospital. He had taken Pearl from her a few times when she asked him to, always when she was sleeping or peaceful; he had carried her into his part of the house and sat studying her tiny face framed among the shawls with an intent concentration which for those minutes would make Zoe hope that he was coming to care for her. But as soon as she stirred or grizzled he handed her back to Zoe as if she were no further business of his.

Because he had only ever touched Zoe when he wanted to make love to her, it didn’t occur to her that he meant anything different by it now. Her body ached with ugliness; even in her tired fog she was conscious of unwashed hair, sweaty heat, a baggy stomach, swollen breasts. Her sexual self seemed buried several miles deep (probably buried, it had seemed to her then, forever). Also, she had just come from dropping tears onto the baby where she had been suckling her in the spare bed, dwelling angrily on Simon’s derelictions. How could he be so cold toward his own daughter? How could he keep up his punishment of Zoe, even if she had done wrong in tricking him into fathering the child? Could it be fair that the whole impossible labor of managing this baby fell upon her, even if that labor was precisely the reason he hadn’t wanted a baby in the first place? (He had said, “It will spoil everything. I’ve seen it happen. People drown in all that mucky stuff. Clever people get stupid, they forget what they used to be, they only think about rusks and sleep and potty training; they actually start to think that these are interesting.”) Zoe had wanted a baby; didn’t that count for anything? Much of her waking thought circled in the treadmill of this unspoken argument with Simon.

— How can you? she said that night when he touched her. How can you even think I would want to? I’m exhausted. You haven’t given me a kind look all day. And the doctor said anyway to wait six weeks.

As soon as the words had been said aloud and were floating in the chilly air above the bed, she was sure that sex wasn’t actually what Simon had meant at all. Really, he’d only been proffering friendliness and consolation. Perhaps he had even been intimating a willingness to hold her poor racked body in his arms while she went off to sleep; at the very thought of that possibility all accusation melted in her (for the moment). He had been offering her his hand across the rift between them; it might have been the beginning of everything changing. Instead, she felt him withdraw his kindness as immediately as if an electric current had cut off, and they lay jangled and motionless, apart. She knew she ought to speak — she could imagine the words of her apologetic explanation forming between them — but no sound came. She lay longing for him to touch her again. She wanted it so intensely that she was sure he must know; she couldn’t believe that such a power of desire aimed at someone close by wasn’t tangible. Oh, please, please, she willed.

She was sure he did know; but he wouldn’t touch her again because he couldn’t forgive her capacity to so grossly misunderstand him. After a while, without a word, he got up out of the bed and took his bathrobe from the door and went downstairs. He must have worked down there or slept in the armchair. In the morning, when Pearl woke at half past six and Zoe came down and lit the gas fire and put on the kettle to boil, she heard him go up and shut the bedroom door behind him, and the accusatory voice inside her thoughts struck up groggily again.

* * *

Simon could see the end of his thesis coming closer. Sometimes if he’d been reading late he found he was actually visualizing the coming end as a figure approaching from far off in flapping robes across a wasteland; one day it occurred to him that the image was from the scene in Pasolini’s The Gospel of St. Matthew where the devil comes to tempt Christ. He felt abashed that he had associated even in his subliminal awareness two such absurdly disproportionate testings — he didn’t really confuse his own petty intellectual agonies with those real ones — and he tried to suppress the picture.

Simon’s supervisor, Kevin Fry, had said already that Simon would be able to publish the thesis when it was finished. Kevin had joined the faculty while Simon was an undergraduate (amid some controversy because of open hostility in the establishment then toward critics influenced by the ideas coming out of France). Simon had been one of a select few students who met in Kevin’s rooms and drank with him; they adopted styles in imitation of his (French cigarettes, old suit waistcoats from the secondhand stall in the market worn over collarless shirts), and submitted to certain implacable judgments as to what one could and could not talk about (eighteenth century was good, Lawrence was beyond bad, T. S. Eliot was boring). When Simon had read more, he understood that some of what he had taken to be Kevin’s original thought derived in fact from the Yale Deconstructionists and Foucault, and he was puzzled that Kevin’s written work seemed dogged, never as fresh or dangerous as his speech.

At a certain point in the course of the PhD supervisions, while Simon was working on Stendhal (the thesis hinged on a comparison of the representations of incarceration in La Chartreuse de Parme and Little Dorrit), he had felt Kevin relinquish his role at the prow of their relationship: he listened to Simon with a new relaxed assent, he marked the work more cursorily, and there was a distinct cooling of their friendship. His French wasn’t as good as Simon’s, but that wasn’t all; Kevin couldn’t keep up with him any longer. Simon had overtaken his mentor; he was better. It had been an almost weightless transaction, that exchange of authority. He had shut the doors to Kevin’s college room behind him one day (double doors made with a six-inch gap between, to insulate the concentrating one from all the noise of the world), and walked out to find spring sunshine after rain in the quad. Everything was altered, as if there had taken place a silent shift under the earth, and he had felt an elated triumphant lightness and a diminishment both at once (where would he put his marker now, to aspire toward?). He even began to have one or two undergraduate followers of his own, who listened to him to find out what to think. He knew you could live a lifetime dedicated to contesting such near-imperceptible shifts of intellectual power, and he was confident of his capacity to come out well in those contests. He did, however, ask himself whether this was the most serious use to which he could put his intelligence.

He was pursuing his thesis in all seriousness. It seemed to him that the only possible justification for academic work was to do something that was bigger than the mere turning over of familiar compost that the system required. One had to be able to work the system, of course; the ideal was to do that — persuasively, authoritatively — with one’s left hand and reach outside it with one’s right, away from the small world of university into the big worlds of history and art (here, of course, was where one put one’s marker for aspiration). One should always have a little bit of contempt in one’s manner for academic work. He thought seriously about other careers when the thesis was finished, the diplomatic service or news reporting from some war zone; he thought about getting a teaching certificate and going to work in the worst kind of schools in the state system. He thought he would be strong enough for any of these. On the other hand, he feared the constraints that would leave him without the space to be free to think largely.

The one ambition he didn’t allow himself (not yet, not yet, not for a long time yet), was to write “creatively” (the very word was absurd, evoking so precisely the dismal queue of hopefuls clutching yellowed carbon-copy typescripts). It was true, there were a few poems (Beckett-like, if anything); but no one had ever seen them, and they didn’t exist, God forbid, anywhere on paper; he only kept them in his mind. He had too vivid an imagination of disaster: a car smash or a fall from a high place, the poems discovered by Zoe or his mother going through his things, misguidedly shown round, the dissimulated smugness of those who had admired him at finding out their imperfections.

He was working, around the time that the baby was born, on his chapter on Tyranny. The idea of his work, and what was good in it, was his strongest happiness; when he wasn’t actually engaged in reading or writing for the thesis he was nonetheless constantly aware of the shape of it, hidden and precious like a smooth stone fitted to his hand inside a pocket or a secret matrix glowing in his chest. The paper he had given at Manchester was on Byron’s “Sonnet on Chillon” and the aristocratic ideal of individual freedom; his basic argument was that there had been an absolute shift in literature between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, from representations of punishment as an issue between individuals, the tyrant and the oppressed one, to modern representations of it as the one-sided outcome of an implacable impersonal system, grinding individuality small in the name of normalization and regulation. The logic of these modern representations ended in Kafka, as he would suggest in his conclusion. His title — which had, in the context, an irony he enjoyed — was “The Chainless Mind,” from Byron.

He was succeeding in keeping all this work on schedule, despite the extra day at the market he had taken on and the broken nights that came with the baby. He had never slept well. Now, if Zoe couldn’t stop the baby crying, Simon got up and went out and walked the streets as he had done years before in the time of his worst insomnia, a solitary prowling in a world turned inside out in the dark. He had not wanted this baby. He had always had a horror of a certain kind of semi-academic domesticity: PhD students turned whey-faced and sour-tempered over their grubby-mouthed and badly behaved offspring; rented flats filled up with a detritus of toys; typewriter and books pushed resentfully aside to make room for plates of baby pap. It seemed to him self-evident that intelligent women with minds of their own would not make the best mothers; how could they bear, if they liked room to think and breathe and read, to be constrained as the mothers of small children must be to the sticky and endlessly repetitive routines of domestic life? He was sympathetic to the conundrum for feminism posed by this tension between motherhood and intelligent life (Kristeva’s fundamentalism was one kind of answer, though it didn’t convince him as the right one). He had reasoned with himself that he had no right to oppose Zoe if she was convinced that a baby was what she wanted (no doubt there were imperatives of female biology he was not equipped to understand); after that first week of hostilities, he had never brought up his reservations again.

He had a distinct impression, however, that Zoe was not managing the baby very well. It cried surely more than they were supposed to, and the mess and smell and chaos in the house were worse than he had feared. Zoe herself was so changed. Her pregnancy had disconcerted him; the distended belly grotesque in its sheer improbability, forcing on whoever saw it naked the unpalatable truth that the oneness of the body is not indivisible. That transformation, however, hadn’t been unexciting. But he was sad that since the birth Zoe was so physically diminished from the proud girl careless of female fuss that she had been. She had always been scornful of women who made a bother about their menstrual cycle; now she was so jangled with hormones that she wept at the news on the radio (over what was happening in Beirut, for example), even if she thought he didn’t see it. Her skin was lusterless; she didn’t seem to find time to wash her hair and wore it pulled back in an elastic band; her stomach was still slack, and her breasts were heavy. She moved him not to desire but at best to a kind of sympathetic pity, which he could perfectly well perceive was the last thing she needed from him or could make any use of. He guessed that she smoldered with resentment against him, and this was exactly the kind of deterioration of their life together — which had been spacious and generous and free — that he had feared would follow the arrival of a child.

Sometimes she gave the baby to him to hold, no doubt in hope that the physical proximity would bring on the tenderness he was supposed to feel. It wasn’t very pretty, although he was amused by its fierce frowning look. He asked himself what bond he felt with this creature made from his own body, and in truth he felt nothing that he might not have felt for anybody else’s baby (some resentment, perhaps, at how its peremptory needs impinged upon him). If it moved him, it was to a blur of dismay at its feeble vulnerability contrasted with the more-than-hopefulness with which it attached itself to its life source, sucking and screaming and shitting, wanting everything. It made him fearful to think how much it didn’t know.

* * *

Simon announced to zoe one day when pearl was about twelve weeks that he was going to take them to visit an old friend of his.

— What old friend? Do I know him?

— Her. She’s got children, that’s why I thought you’d get on. I’ve borrowed a car.

It was absolutely characteristic of Simon that Zoe had had no idea that he had learned to drive or passed his test; he frowned now when she interrogated him.

— It seemed a kind of idiocy not to know. But it’s a process of no intrinsic interest. First you can’t do it, and then you practice, and then you can.

Actually, she thought he was more anxious about the driving than he would ever confess, so she was anxious too, and the journey passed in a tense silence, with Zoe clutching the sleeping Pearl tightly and watching the road as if their lives depended on her concentration. She had thought they would be driving somewhere in Cambridge, but he headed south out of the city, into Suffolk. After forty minutes or so, just outside Haverhill, and as if he had been here before and knew exactly where he was going, Simon pulled off the road into a stony puddled driveway and stopped in front of what looked as if it had once been a farmhouse, patched and extended with a straggle of outbuildings, screened by trees from the road with open fields behind. The house was neither neglected nor done up but in a middle position between the two, with heaps of builder’s sand and bricks and a cement mixer in the yard, all pooled with rainwater. The sun as they stopped was just struggling out from between lowering dark clouds; a blond woman in high-heeled boots and jeans and a white polo neck came round the side of the house as if she’d been listening out for them.

— The front door doesn’t open; we have to go in at the back; nothing works here; my heating was off all last week. Never marry a man who promises he’s going to do everything himself. Hugh has been doing up this place for four years. But he’s also running his own business, selling these trough things for planting made out of old tires, so of course meantime we live on a building site.

She explained all this ruefully to Zoe while she took them round the back — more mud, more heaps of sand and cinder blocks, also a brave showing of daffodils — and into a big warm downstairs room with a low-beamed ceiling, Laura Ashley wallpaper, an old stripped pine dresser, and a huge sagging sofa piled with patchwork cushions. Insulating material was visible around the edges of the windows, and the wiring hung in loops along the beams. Big logs smoldered in an open stone fireplace heaped with several days’ worth of ash; a little fair-haired girl was drawing at a table.

— Everything’s dirty.

The woman wiped her finger along the dresser and showed the dust disgustedly to Zoe. She was pretty and brisk, with a long straight nose, eyes slightly too close together, and natural pink in her cheeks (although the blond was dyed).

— I’ve surrendered in the battle with dirt here. If you knew how I longed sometimes to live in a little new semi with central heating and constant hot water.… I’m Dina, by the way. It’s nice to meet you. Simon’s told me all about you. And this is Simon’s baby. I can’t quite believe it. I must say, I didn’t think old Simon would get caught so soon. But it doesn’t look anything like you, Si. Oh, aren’t they just delicious at this age? Couldn’t you just eat them? Can I have a cuddle with her? No, wait, I’ll put some coffee on first, I don’t know about you two but I’m gasping. And I’m not allowed my first ciggy til I have a coffee. Which sometimes means I have it very early.

Simon was crouched, poking at the fire.

— Do you make decent coffee? I can’t remember.

— So, how do you two know each other? Zoe asked. She couldn’t imagine how this woman came to be a friend of Simon’s; she belonged to one of those types of person whose existence he usually managed to seem entirely unaware of: countryish and probably Tory-voting and definitely not bothered about things intellectual. There were some shelves of books, but they looked like nature books and stately-home books and perhaps even Jilly Cooper.

— Oh! (Dina looked quickly at Simon, as if he might want to answer first.) We grew up together. We lived practically next door. Our parents were friends. Of course, I’m more Ricky’s age than Simon’s; horribly ancient, as I’m sure you can tell. Simon, why don’t you leave that fire alone before you kill it?

— Zoe doesn’t know enough people with children, Simon said. That’s why I brought her.

— Well, children we do have here, if not much else. This is Bryony. (The little girl had climbed down from her drawing and was tugging at her mother to ask if she could hold Pearl.) Megan’s upstairs having her nap, thank God. A moment’s peace. You wait till you meet Megan. Hell on tottering legs, isn’t she, Bryony? And Charlie is at our local school, which is a sweet place. I’ll have to go in the car and pick him up at three-fifteen. My husband is away, of course, as usual.

— I’ll be back before then, Simon said.

— Be back? Zoe was astonished; she had had no idea he was going to leave her here.

— Won’t it be nice? said Dina. The girls will love to play with the baby. I’ve made some soup for lunch. And we could go for a walk if it brightens up. You can borrow wellies. We’ve got every size.

Zoe could hardly protest. And in fact she found herself not wanting to; it was better to be here with company than passing another long day in the mess of home. She might have been shy, but Dina seemed surprisingly eager to entertain her. Without Simon there, Zoe could study Dina uninhibitedly, trying to find out how one became a convincing mother of children. A certain flat manner seemed to work, without excesses of adoration or temper, wry in the face of catastrophe. Megan spilled orange squash at lunch, then scraped her knee jumping off the end of the sofa (“Mummy’ll put magic cream on”). The trick was to manage tortoise pace and businesslike both at once. They all professed to adore Pearl, who didn’t cry but watched the little girls with absorbed interest and then peacefully fed, only twisting her head away to check on her audience from time to time. Dina said she was so envious of breast-feeding—“that lovely time before the mucky eating starts.”

After lunch Dina found wellington boots for Zoe and put Pearl in a sort of backpack; Zoe had not known about these. (“Keep it. Megan’s much too big for it. It’s just clutter. See how she loves to look around her? You can get Si to carry her about in it. She’s obviously not the dopey sort of baby. Dopey’s much easier, of course. I’ll swear Charlie just slept for the first six months. I had to wake him up to feed him.”) They walked up the side of a steep plowed field in fresh wet air under a ragged sky, and then into some woods full of bluebells; the little girls in their bright waterproofs and boots went stumping in the puddles. When they got back, Dina made drop scones on a griddle and Zoe fed Pearl again at the kitchen table.

— I’ll tell you the strictest rule of motherhood, said Dina. Don’t eat what they leave. Look at this tummy of mine. That’s all fish fingers and bread-and-butter soldiers, truly.

— So what was Ricky like? Zoe asked.

A shock interrupted for an instant as rapid as a camera shutter the batter flowing from the spoon onto the smoking griddle. Dina turned an open and smiling face round to Zoe from the stove.

— Ricky? Oh, he was just a nice boy. A really happy, nice boy. Everyone loved Ricky.

— Simon worshiped him.

— It made a bloody mess of that family, the whole thing.

— Who’s Ricky? asked Bryony.

— Just someone Mummy used to know, who sadly died.

— What from? She put on a grown-up commiserating voice.

— He just got poorly.

— That’s sad. Was this long, long ago?

— It was, yes. In olden days.

Zoe didn’t know where Simon went, while she was with Dina all day. He came late to collect her. (“Oh, that’s so typical,” Dina said. “He never remembers.”) Zoe had stayed with the little girls when Dina drove to school, and then they drank tea, waiting for him, running out of conversation, while the children watched television and it began to rain outside.

On the way home, Zoe shook out a thought she hadn’t known she’d had.

— I suppose, she said, she was the girlfriend you once told me about. I mean your brother’s girlfriend, who you were angry with when he died.

— You invented angry. Simon concentrated past the pounding windscreen wipers.

— But she was that girl?

— She was a friend. They wrote to each other when they were both away at school.

The baby slept. Simon leaned forward to peer through the wind-screen because the rain was heavy, flickering in a confusing low light coming through a row of tall poplars beside the road.

— And I suppose you’ve had some sort of a thing going on with her at some point?

He was silent for long minutes, which she knew didn’t mean denial or assent, only a disavowal of her right to know, a disdain for the slack words she’d chosen.

— Are we going to start talking as if we own each other? he asked her.

* * *

Zoe got better at managing her new life. her stomach shrank back to flatness, she could get into her jeans, she washed her hair in the kitchen sink and then had it cut off as short as a boy’s. She grew less afraid of Pearl and manhandled her more boldly, kissing her with gobbling noises all over her head, blowing raspberries on her stomach while she was changing her until she laughed her throaty laugh. Pearl slept better at night and in the day, and then when Zoe heard her waking in her cot she hurried up the stairs to her with happy anticipation, eager to set eyes on her and hold her close again, as if even an hour’s separation awoke a yearning lack in her. Zoe discovered there could be a strenuous kind of pleasure in managing her house and her days. She set herself a routine and moved determinedly around inside it; at the end of the evening the dishes were washed and the kitchen floor was swept and the haricot beans were put on to soak. Then she sat up in bed, giving Pearl her midnight feed and running over in her head a list of tasks to be accomplished for the next day. This wasn’t the highest form of intelligent life, but it had its satisfactions.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t still bad days, of mess and mistakes and tedium. Four months after the birth she still hadn’t finished a book or been out in the evening. When she tried to have a coffee with Carol in Rose Crescent, Pearl cried and wouldn’t feed discreetly, and she had to take her outside and leave Carol to finish. She longed for adult company, and then when occasionally friends came round she feared she wouldn’t have enough to talk about: she couldn’t expect them to be interested for more than a few moments that she was trying Pearl on solid foods or that she had taken her to the Botanical Gardens to show her the ducks. She was impatient for Simon to come home, yet when he came he didn’t talk to her but sat in the cold front room to read.

She was thinking about Simon all the time, but not in the old way. There was a disorienting disproportion between their minimal actual contact and her passionate interior indictment of him that ran its dull marathon day after day inside her head. In the flesh they exchanged a few transactional words, friendly enough; they made their mutually considerate movements around the shared functional spaces of the little cottage — the bath, the kettle, the toilet in the yard — and in bed at night sometimes their feet touched accidentally or she woke to find that in her sleep she had bundled herself against his warm back and was breathing in his smell. And yet her argument with him was clamorous when he wasn’t there; in her imagination she appealed as if in some public forum and to witnesses, presenting all the evidence of his unnatural behavior. If they could see my life, she thought, burning with its injustice. He’s wrong, he’s wrong! He believes he’s so unassailably right, but he’s wrong. At the same time she was calculating how she could disguise this very madness of their private life from her parents when they came to stay.

Simon had taken over her job on the market, and she had had to give up any idea of going back to the bag shop; Carol had gallantly offered to have Pearl for a couple of afternoons (perhaps picturing a sleeping mouselike creature in its shawls as Zoe once had), but Pearl screamed and wouldn’t take milk from a bottle, Carol was helpless, and they gave it up after the second time. Then the landlord telephoned from the Portland Arms to ask if Zoe could do a couple of evenings, and because they needed the money they tried it. Simon stayed at home to baby-sit; it was usually in the evenings that Pearl slept best and longest, so he ought to be able to work without being interrupted. Zoe didn’t admit to him that she quite enjoyed the synthetic companionableness of the pub; she adopted his own air of uncomplaining stoicism.

One night when she came home at eleven-thirty, Simon and Pearl were gone. She stood in bewilderment looking into Pearl’s empty cot, breathing in the cigarette smoke soaked into her clothes; her long skirt was wet with beer at the hem where it had dragged in the mess behind the bar. Downstairs she saw that the pram was also gone from its place in the yard. She ran out into the lane at the back and up to the street that crossed it at one end, then ran back in case they came the other way and she missed them. It was a still summer’s night, as cold as stone; the moon stood in a chilly ring of light. Staring along the empty lane her arms goosefleshed; she went back inside and tidied up, expecting any minute to hear them come in. Pearl must have cried; he must have taken her out to calm her. His books were left open on his desk, his pen laid down on his page presumably when he went to pick her up. Zoe went outside again, looked up and down. It would have been so easy for Simon to leave her a note, explaining where he was taking her. She changed into her pajamas, to be ready for bed when they arrived; then she changed again into her jeans, thinking suddenly that if there were an emergency she needed to be ready to go at once.

After an hour she tried to phone the hospital, in case Pearl had been taken ill and Simon had rushed her in; but she could find only one number for the hospital in the phone book, and when she dialed it she got the tone that meant it had been disconnected. On an impulse, her heart hollow and her mind dazzling with panic, she dialed her parents’ number; she thought she would ask them what she ought to do. Some pent-up anguish welled in her like a billowing behind silk; she didn’t know what confession might rip out of her if she heard her mother’s voice. The phone rang but they didn’t answer. Probably they were asleep. She pictured the nook where their phone sat on a blackened old antique chest beside a lamp made out of a stoneware bottle and a plateful of painted eggs; she pictured their bed, with its old throw of Irish white crocheted lace over the humps of their shapes in the dark. She let the phone ring for as long as it took her to pace out in her mind the distance between the two. That sleeping other house seemed an unattainable happiness in her present distress.

Retreating upstairs to sit on the bed with her arms hugged round her knees, she was seized by one terrible imagining. She seemed to see Simon pushing the pram down by the river in the dark to where there was a gap between thickly clumped trees, and the moon shone on the water; she heard Pearl’s frantic bleating cry, knowing how it could wind crushingly tight around your sane awareness; she imagined she saw Simon lift a squalling bundle out of the pram and douse its noise in the dark water like putting out a light, holding it under for a long time. She knew there was no rational foundation for imagining this, but once she had glimpsed it so vividly the scene acquired a persuasive reality all its own; when she tried to suppress it, the moment of the dipping of the bundle in the black river flickered over and over compulsively in her mind like a stuck film.

— What other reason, she half convinced herself, could he have for being out so long? For two hours, with a baby, in the middle of the night?

Somehow, from sitting up on the bed she keeled over so that her face was against the pillows; and then even in the midst of frantic anxiety she lost herself in her exhaustion and tumbled into obliviousness (a voice came: “If it’s all over, then at least I can sleep”). Sometime later she woke to the sound of the back-door latch and the well-known nudging of the pram wheels through the narrow entrance to the yard. By the time she got downstairs, Simon was parking the pram carefully in its space under the kitchen window, reaching with his foot for the brake.

— What have you done with her? cried Zoe wildly.

He even sounded pleased with himself.

— She wouldn’t take the bottle, and I couldn’t calm her down. So I thought if I pushed her in the pram it would probably be the most soothing thing.

— And where is she now?

An instant’s hesitation while he took in her tone, and then a different coldness in his voice.

— She’s here, of course. It did work. She’s asleep.

— But you’ve been hours! You can’t have been pushing her around for all this time!

— On the contrary. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. It was an extraordinary night. There was a moon: I could see everything clearly. We went a long way down the cycle path beside the river.

— Good God! It’s freezing cold out there. What were you thinking of?

Now they were frankly enemies; there was a terrible liberation in it.

— Actually, I think she was cold in her cot and that’s why she woke up, she’d kicked the blankets off. I put her outdoor suit on. I wrapped her up well. I felt her every so often, to make sure she was warm enough. Whatever have you been imagining?

— What did you think I’d think? Why didn’t you leave a note?

He shrugged.

— I didn’t think we’d be out long. And then it was good, walking. I thought you’d be glad of the chance to get some sleep when you came back from work.

— Which just shows how much you’ve taken in of our routine. She has a feed at midnight, when I get home.

— Oh, obviously I didn’t quite appreciate how tight a timetable you run on. My apologies if I’ve thrown the whole system out of sync by taking the baby for a walk. I have to say, she hardly seems to be desperate from starvation. One wonders if the baby isn’t being managed to suit the system, rather than the other way around.

— Don’t think I don’t know what you think about my life. But you’re wrong; you have no idea of how this has to be done. Why can’t you just for once take it from me?

— This is intolerable, Simon said. (They weren’t shouting but hissing in whispers, so as not to wake Pearl.) We shouldn’t let this go any further, in decency.

— Oh, absolutely. I absolutely agree, we shouldn’t.

— Just what exactly were you imagining had happened?

— How was I to know? I thought you might have had to rush her to hospital, I thought you might have done something to her—

— Done something to her? Simon let those words settle around them where they stood, squeezed between the bulk of the washing machine and the bikes and the pram in the ghostly gray yard; they could see because Zoe had left all the lights on inside the house. In the shadows the deep-set eyes and lean hollows of Simon’s face were exaggerated.

— I think you’re slightly unbalanced. Motherhood has made you sick.

He found the brake under the pram and put it on.

— Perhaps you should talk to somebody.

— But not to you?

— I don’t think we have anything left to say.

When Simon had gone (he took a couple of books down from his shelves and then went out by the front door, which they never used), Zoe left Pearl sleeping in the pram. She moved around the house in a high bright humming lightness, as if something had been resolved; she took down her rucksack from the top of the wardrobe and began efficiently to pack clothes and necessities for her and for Pearl. She did wonder whether Simon would wake up his friend and borrow the car again and drive to Dina’s; Dina’s husband would no doubt conveniently be away and she would move over for him in the big marital bed, glad to be relieved by this adventure from the boredom of life in the middle of nowhere with only small children for company. Zoe thought through all this without any feeling about it whatsoever, simply as if a clear light glanced upon possibilities; in her mind’s eye she saw the pair of them coupling busily, tiny and far off.

She put together a travel kit in a separate bag for Pearl, with jars of homemade pureed vegetables and made-up baby rice and a spoon and a wet flannel in a plastic bag for wiping her face; and clean nappies and cotton wool and baby oil and a towel to change her on and more plastic bags for wrapping up the dirty nappies. “He just doesn’t realize how complicated it has to be,” she said to herself once, but that didn’t seem to start up the old lumbering train of accusation and counteraccusation inside her thoughts; the wrangling with Simon’s way of seeing things had subsided. Simon was right. Something horrible had happened to them, and in all decency they must end it. Making her plans — she would have to wait in the morning until the banks were open, then ask her taxi to stop on the way to the station so she could cash a check — she was as light-headed as if she were escaping on holiday.

When she eventually fell asleep, it was curled up on the side of the bed expecting to be roused at any moment: she dreamed a succession of rapid anxious dreams including one about trying to get ready for a party with a kind of tickertape machine strapped to her belly, trailing yards of readout (there had really been one of these at the prenatal clinic, to measure the baby’s heartbeat). In the pram Pearl slept all through the night without a feed for the first time, and only woke at seven the next morning.

* * *

Joyce had been reading andrea dworkin’s pornography. she was arguing about it with Ray while she cooked him fillets of chicken in wine and cream for his supper; he sat listening at the kitchen table in a posture of suitable abjection, enjoying his preprandial whisky and smoke. Joyce had her hair pulled up high on her head in an assertive ponytail; under her apron she was wearing some sort of black cheesecloth dungarees, cinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt.

— What she’s saying is that there isn’t one special thing called pornography, which is separate from the other ways that men see women. She’s saying that because of the whole system we exist inside, every time a man looks at a woman, the way he sees her is a part of this whole exploitative sex thing.

— But you can’t seriously believe that’s true, Ray said coaxingly. (He knew from experience that when Joyce was fired up in one of her rare but periodic ideological indignations, conciliation was a better tactic than outright contempt.) It’s just such a reductive travesty. I mean, what about all those wonderful complex portraits of women in books and paintings? Anna Karenina, for example; you love that, don’t you? But it’s written by a man.

— Oh, don’t make it too easy for me! exclaimed Joyce.

She used her spatula to flip over the fillets in a noisy spatter of hot butter; she poured in a carton of cream and salted and peppered it, then turned the heat down.

— Anna Karenina! Don’t try to tell me Tolstoy hasn’t got some sex thing twisted up in there. Why can’t he let it work out between her and Vronsky? Every time Tolstoy describes how desirable she is, he says how shamed and disgusted she ought to feel at herself.

— Anyway, how can you take seriously anyone with a name like Andrea Dworkin? I suppose she’s got to be American. I’d love to see if there’s an author photo. I can just imagine—

— You see there? You’re doing it! Exactly what she says!

It was at this point that the doorbell rang.

— Who on earth can that be? We’re going to eat in twenty minutes. You’ll have to send them away.

Ray loped downstairs to the front door. He had a hunch it was going to be a particular ex-student of his — male, luckily — who seemed to have developed a bit of a fixation on Ray’s work. He didn’t mind the bloke and quite enjoyed their late-night holdings-forth on art and philosophy, but Joyce couldn’t stand him; she said he was creepy and his feet smelled. If it was Morris he’d have to send him away; possibly he could suggest a meeting later in the Buffy. He mentally gauged the temperature of the marital waters. It would have to be quite a bit later, leaving time enough for him to help with the washing up, make coffee, be charming, bring Joyce round on this absurd pornography-Dworkin issue.

It wasn’t Morris.

— Your mother told me, Ray said, when he brought Zoe and Pearl upstairs into the kitchen after his own exclamations and greetings on the doorstep, that I had to send whoever it was away. It’s lucky for her that although I almost unvaryingly obey her every command, I made an exception this time.

He put down Zoe’s rucksack and bag with an impresario air.

Joyce let the lid of the potato pan fall with a loud clatter.

— Zoe! What are you doing here?

They were so startling: this young woman their daughter, so tall and thin and changed, with new adult marks of tiredness and strain on her face and her short boy’s hair, and round breasts for the first time; and her astonishing baby, who stared at them with unsmiling penetration from where she sat at home on Zoe’s hip.

— How wonderful! Zoe darling, this is marvelous!

— I know you won’t have a cot or anything, said Zoe, but we could make her up a bed in a drawer.

— Oh my God! She’s so beautiful! Ray, do you see her hair? We can borrow something. The Chanders have got grandchildren. We can phone them, Ray. Oh, I don’t believe her. Pearl? Hello, Pearl! Will she come to me? She won’t come to me; she doesn’t know me.

Pearl hid her face decidedly against Zoe.

— She just needs to get used to things. She’s so tired, said Zoe, kissing her scalp. She’s never been on trains before. She was so interested in everything that she’s hardly slept. And she’s got a stinking nappy. I didn’t know where to change her. Luckily she only pooed in the last hour. People who were sitting by us moved away. I ought to change her now.

— Upstairs in the bedroom. I’ll get out towels; I’ll find a bowl for warm water. Poor little thing, poor darling, poor little sore botty. And you had to hump all this stuff right across London to Paddington on your own, with the baby? Where’s Simon?

— I’ve left him, said Zoe. I’ve run away. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m not going back. I don’t care.

— Zoe, what’s happened?

— What about this chicken, Joyce? Should I give it a stir?

— Turn it off, said Joyce impatiently. I’ll see to it later. It doesn’t matter.

— I just thought Zoe might be hungry.

— I am, very hungry.

— Then we can eat straightaway; she can have mine. Ray, get on the phone to the Chanders: Can we borrow everything they’ve got? Are you still feeding her yourself? What’s going on with you and Simon?

Joyce watched over the changing of the nappy incredulously as if she was present at some miracle, pained at the soreness of the baby’s bottom, distressed at the crying Zoe took no notice of. Then Zoe fed Pearl at the table while she ate, shoveling in chicken and creamed potatoes greedily, dropping peas on the baby’s head.

In a great torrent, all Zoe’s grievance poured out. She had never spoken about Simon to anyone for all the six years she had known him, except neutrally and transactionally or to speak for him, describing his work or his opinions. The relief of explaining now made her dizzy, mixed up with her hunger and exhaustion and the adrenaline that still flooded her from their rupture and her headlong escape.

— He sort of decides what the right position is for him to take, then scrupulously sticks to it. I mean, he didn’t want the baby, and it wasn’t even truly an accident, so that was my fault. Only, how come the fact I wanted it didn’t count for anything? And you know he never touched me — I mean, literally, even with his hand — except when he wanted to make love to me. This isn’t since the baby was born; I mean ever, in all this time. Then there was this old girlfriend of his. He took me to see her, I think he wanted to show me how to manage to be a better mother, but of course I worked out that there was something between them. For all I know he’s probably with her right now. He hates stupidity, so that you’re always afraid of saying something false, only you wonder whether it isn’t more false to think first about everything you say. He wasn’t with me when Pearl was born, he didn’t really come in the next day like I told you — he had to give his paper at the conference because of course that was more important — and then when he came in to the hospital eventually on the last day you could see he was disgusted, physically disgusted by the whole place, even the smell of it. I’ve come to see how he uses intellectual ideas and books like a sort of stronghold to separate himself off from ordinary people, so he doesn’t have to stumble around in a mess like they do. He was furious that I’d given her his surname; he said it was a conspiracy to try to implicate him.

Now she had her public and her jury in the palm of her hand. After the first tug, all this long-meditated treachery came away so fluently from inside her, rich and slick. So apt and so already persuaded were her audience that she could even seem to bend over backward to do Simon justice — to reiterate that he was only consistent with himself, that he had never actually physically hurt her — knowing that Ray and Joyce would supply the condemnation she withheld.

— And to be fair, of course, last night I had made a fuss about nothing and she was fine. He’d just taken her out for a perfectly innocent walk. So to him it must seem that I’m this sort of harridan, dementedly policing her routine, because he can’t imagine what it feels like, trying to cope with a new baby without support. Although that’s what I said to him, originally. I said he wouldn’t have to do anything. I promised him I’d manage it all by myself.

— But how could you have known what you were promising, then? protested Joyce. What kind of man could see the woman he loved struggling with looking after his own child and not want to be with her, helping her?

— He’s a pretty bloody mixed-up kid, said Ray.

— I wish you’d told us earlier.

— I could see he was very bright. But too careful. Afraid to give anything away.

— And how could he not think she’s the most beautiful baby in the world? Do you think she’ll come to me now? I can’t believe she’s got my hair. This was my dad’s hair, you know. I wish Mum was here to see her.

— I wish it too.

— We always found him hard work, to be honest, to spend time with.

— Ssh, Ray.

* * *

Ray’s sister fran had gone to live with the protesters against cruise missiles at Greenham Common. Her husband had died suddenly of heart failure, and after subsiding into disappointed widowhood for a couple of years Fran joined a woman’s group and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, changing her sensible school-secretary clothes for dungarees and a reefer jacket pinned with political badges. When she moved up to live under plastic at Green Gate she left three indignant teenage children to fend for themselves. Her house had always been immaculate; in her absence it descended headlong into a dismayingly filthy chaos. Sometimes Fran came home at weekends to clean the toilet and disinfect the sink and run the washing machine nonstop, but she didn’t seem to seriously care. Joyce had thought she was worried for Fran as well as for the children left behind to run wild. Fran was so trusting; who knew what kind of people she was getting involved with up there? She had lost her grip since Laurence died; she was making rash decisions that would affect her future. Ray reassured her. Fran had loved Girl Guide camp when she was a teenager and this was probably much the same sort of thing (privations and rivalries, high ideals and passionate crushes).

Now Joyce found herself telling Fran’s stories to Zoe enthusiastically: how the women danced in toy police helmets in mockery in front of the lines of policemen; how they lay across the entrances to the base and had to be dragged away; how wire-cutting parties forayed inside the compound and sprayed the missile silos with red paint. She couldn’t stop talking and being busy, as if Zoe’s arrival had gone to her head; she emptied cupboards to find baby blankets, ripped up perfectly good sheets for the cot, poured big gin and tonics at a time of the evening when she and Ray didn’t usually drink.

— You did the right thing, walking out of there. Starting off a completely new life. It wasn’t possible for the women of my generation; we didn’t know you could get away with it. I’m going to learn to drive. I don’t want to have to depend on your father for everything. Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to take off in the car whenever you felt like it and go anywhere you wanted? I so admire what Fran has done. Ray takes it for granted that I haven’t got it in me, but you never know.

— But you’re not unhappy? I mean, Dad isn’t unkind?

Joyce looked at her unfocusedly, as if across wastelands of complications.

— It’s not that. It’s nothing he does particularly. It’s just the whole house, the whole thing, keeping everything looking nice, worrying about everybody else. It’s my own fault. I ought to have the courage to walk away from it all.

Zoe was cautious.

— I think the driving lessons are a good idea.

* * *

Zoe had forgotten her pajamas. she had to borrow one of Joyce’s nightdresses: skimpy coffee-colored satin and lace, nothing she would ever normally have worn. She seemed to fall into sleep through layer upon layer of delicious awareness: the silky gown, clean sheets, Pearl in the Chanders’ crib, which Ray had put together with some exasperated difficulty, the bright luxurious comfort of the house, the promise of days and days of respite to come when she needn’t be perpetually on duty and vigilant. Joyce was only busy two mornings a week (she taught dressmaking classes); they could spend long hours talking and shopping and looking after Pearl together. They could talk on and on about Zoe’s leaving Simon; Joyce would be bottomlessly sympathetic. Of course Zoe would have to decide what she was going to do with her life — but not yet. (She might perhaps pick up her PhD again, transfer it down here. Anything might happen.)

And then as she fell down and down, radiant with relief and vindication, Zoe came all of a sudden to some deep sad place and knew she hadn’t quite told her parents the truth about Simon. What she had said looked like the truth, so that no one else but her would ever know the difference; but it wasn’t the whole truth. She would need to start out all over again if she wanted to describe what he was actually like, in justice. Only it was too late to start now, she was asleep, she was so nearly asleep that all she could muster to represent her nagging worry to herself was a picture of Simon filling his fountain pen from a bottle of black ink at his desk — absorbed and careful, wiping off the surplus with a tissue — which didn’t mean anything at all and was extinguished anyway the next moment in the oblivion that crashed upon her like an overwhelming sea.