Everything Will Be All Right

Eight

Daniel had gone into business with Uncle Cliff; then he married an Italian girl and they set up their own company importing delicatessen foods. After the first few difficult years they had done very well. They had moved to London and bought a loft apartment in Butler’s Wharf. He and Zoe weren’t exactly close. He read some of his sister’s articles in academic journals; although he hadn’t been to university, he was good at quickly picking up an argument and testing it. He didn’t positively disagree with anything she wrote. The world of arms trading and nuclear buildup seemed very remote from his innocent trafficking in olive oils and salamis, but he suspected nonetheless that Zoe judged him as if he were contaminated by it (even when he and Flavia made the decision to source all their products with organic suppliers). Perhaps she thought that making money was in itself intrinsically compromising. In return, Daniel teased Zoe about the unworldliness of academics.

They got on all right. Sometimes when Zoe had to be in London she stayed with them; whenever Daniel went home to see his parents he called in on Zoe (especially if Ray was working up for one of his artist moods, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood). Daniel was privately amused that in spite of Zoe’s expertise in conflict resolution she didn’t seem to be able to control her own daughter. Pearl was disobedient and difficult: a nonsleeper, a scene maker. She howled in her push chair and threw her toys. When she was older she called her mother a bitch, played her music loud, had her ears and then her nose pierced without permission, came home late and drunk from escapades in town. Even Joyce, who adored Pearl (more, Daniel suspected, than she adored his own two much more charming and better behaved little boys), had to concede that she could be hard work.

After Zoe published her second book (on the history of the relationship between arms manufacturers and defense establishments in Western Europe during the Cold War), he saw her name around even more often. She sometimes wrote for the broadsheet newspapers now. She was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at a big conference on civilians in conflict, which was held (coincidentally) only a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center. She turned up at his place on the Saturday evening when the conference was over; Maryse, their Romanian girl, was putting the kids to bed; Flavia was out at the restaurant, which was their pet sideline. Zoe was still frantic with adrenaline; when she’d been to kiss the boys good night she started telling Daniel some involved story about Palestinian students on their way to the conference being interrogated at Heathrow by immigration officials. He mixed martinis, but he couldn’t make her sit down until she had drunk off the first one, standing watching out of the windows as the sun went down over the Thames, behind Tower Bridge.

— I’m mad about your view, she said. I’d like to stay looking at it all night. I could even be tempted to be rich, in return for this.

He was impressed with his sister in her public clothes: a narrow dark-green wool skirt and jacket with bone buttons, a little cream blouse with a square-cut collar, dangling chunky silver and green earrings. (At home she looked as if she didn’t bother to notice what she was putting on in the mornings.) She used no makeup, her hair was cropped short, she didn’t have any figure, and she wore flat shoes and strode about like a man, but he could see all this might appeal to a certain type. He put out bread and cheeses and cold meats on the glass-topped dining table and left the lights off so they seemed to float in the pink and orange sunset. She tucked in hungrily.

— Look at you, stuffing your face. But you’re such a beanpole. How come you never put on weight? I wish I could get away with it.

— Eat with me, she said with her mouth full, pushing bread and cheese across to him. Danny, it’s all delicious. What’s this one called?

— I’m not supposed to, I’ve already eaten. It’s raviggiolo: sheep’s milk cheese, from a new little place we’ve found in Umbria. You should eat it with the pear. Perhaps I’ll just cut myself a corner.

— It’s fantastic. The food was probably all right at the conference, but I’m always so busy talking I forget to have any. And today I was too nervous about my paper.

— Go well?

— Mmm.

She took a swallow of drink to clear her mouth so she could elaborate.

— Do you know how many deaths from small arms are estimated annually? Four million. Knocks road accidents at thirty thousand into a cocked hat. Ninety percent civilians. Eighty percent women and children. Most of them aren’t even war casualties. Revenge killings, murders, tribal conflict.

She sounded almost gloating. It was an occupational hazard, he supposed, that you would end up exulting over the excesses that proved your case. Her readiness to name horrors in ordinary conversation always embarrassed him, as if it was an error of taste.

— Flavia and I are starting to think it might not be a bad idea to move out of London. Wondering if this is really how we want to bring up our children and all that. I’d like them to know something about green fields. And, being realistic, if anything happens we’re right in the middle of it. I stood at these windows a few weeks ago expecting God knows what to fall out of the sky.

— You mustn’t think like that, said Zoe earnestly, wiping a smear of grease off her cheek with the napkin he gave her. If you start to think like that, they’ve really won.

— Well. Easily said.

— No, truly; if once we start to abdicate from these city spaces, we hand imagination of them over to the rhetoricians of apocalypse on both sides. And that brings their horrible endgame one step nearer. We have to go on asserting by sheer persistence that it’s possible to live here, live our ordinary hopeful life.

She was emphatic; he could imagine her waxing passionate like this in front of her audience, gesturing at them with those hands that seemed so big in proportion to her narrow thinness. (Perhaps she had used the very words she used to him, at the conference today.) She was drunk on power, probably, as well as the martini. He could guess how it could go to your head, all those faces turned your way, all that deferential assent and stimulating contest.

— Any male talent at your conference, Zo? Aren’t you academics supposed to get up to all sorts of wickedness when the papers are over and the bar is open?

He wondered if he’d got it right from the way she laughed, tearing off more bread, the usual tension in her posture unlocked and slack.

— Dear little brother. Concerned as ever for my happiness.

— I just worry that you pick them so deep. I wish you’d find one with a sense of humor.

— You sound just like our mother.

* * *

Zoe had a window seat in the train home on sunday morning. She had some work from one of her graduate students to mark, but she let it lie on the table in front of her; she couldn’t read more than a sentence before her mind was possessed again by images and snatches of remembered exchanges from the weekend. The aftermath of these high points for her was always a kind of excruciated awakening, as if she had been drunk or dreaming and must now sort over the rash things she had done in cold judgment. Even the talks she gave seemed to her afterward full of risk; she worried that she had stressed the wrong thing, or that in her fixation on certain interpretations of the facts she had allowed herself to be oblivious to others.

Now she had added to that usual exposure the foolishness of a flirtation. She wondered scaldingly how conspicuous it had been. Had she shown in her face how she glowed in response to his persistence, when he made everyone move up so he could sit beside her in the bar and introduce himself? It was that moment of his choosing her that snatched away her peace now, rather than the shy and fumbled kiss they had exchanged before they retired to their respective single rooms. He had been young. Not impossibly young, but quite a bit younger, in a skinny sweater with a little string of amber beads round his throat. (Perhaps he had only been trying to further his academic career.) She had danced; she never usually danced. It had not seemed stupid to her at the time. She had lain awake after they kissed good night, burning with the idea of him, fantasizing over and over that she got out of bed and went padding along the corridors in her pajamas to find his room (they were both in the same conference accommodation wing), or that he came knocking softly at her door. But now in the train she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and thought it was stupid. It was humiliating. It was particularly humiliating that they hadn’t even had sex together. What was she doing at her age, burning up at the idea of a look and half a kiss? Thank God at least that probably nobody would believe it had only been that. No one need know she was susceptible as a virgin girl.

She stared out of the windows at autumnal England. All the debate of the conference — retaliation, escalation, war — was a receding tide in her ears. Nothing happened here. Her irritation at it steadied her, the deep secretive fertility of this countryside, its dense thickets, the fur of its woods snuggled around the hills; it was all shelter for the sentimentalities of those who thought this was the “real” England, whatever else went on (even foot-and-mouth, even the burning pyres of stiff-limbed dead cattle). In the dells nestled mock-Tudor mansions and real Georgian ones, weathering attractively together; the pleasure boats cosied up on the river; the former farm-laborers’ cottages had been made over expensively for the nostalgic consumption of a different class. The creamy-mauve long grasses soughed and flattened themselves seductively in the fields.

But nowhere is safe, she thought.

Amid all the professional glooms and denunciations, it was easy to forget to be afraid. An irrational panic flapped a disorienting black wing across her thoughts. She was anxious to see Pearl. She had not been vigilant, she had not phoned; anything could have happened to her daughter while she was distracted. Pearl had been left alone in the house for all this time. (She was seventeen; she had reacted to the idea of a baby-sitter with outrage.) Zoe had called home from Paddington but she hadn’t answered. Probably she was still in bed. Often she didn’t get back from clubbing in town until three or four in the morning, and then she would sleep until late afternoon the next day. (A twinge of painful adjustment as usual on returning home: How was it possible that in the same world there existed students like the serious hard-working ones she met at these international conferences, burdened with gratitude for the opportunity of an education, and seventeen-year-olds dedicated as unswervingly as Pearl to her own pleasures?)

* * *

Zoe rang the bell while she paid off the taxi; then she had to hunt in her bag for her key. The front door opened directly off the terraced street, whose length was only punctuated by streetlamps (the tree that had been put in on the corner had died). Of course there was no reason to expect Pearl to be at home. She might be at a friend’s; she might be at her grandmother’s (Joyce was supposed to be keeping an eye on her). The front-room curtains were drawn across. They must have been drawn across all day; perhaps for the whole four days that Zoe had been away.

— Pearl? Sweetheart? I’m back! Zoe called, into the darkness of the narrow hall. The light didn’t seem to work; the bulb must have gone.

She hardly thought about her house while she was away. It was her shell, her refuge to crawl into and be private; she loved it but took no interest in it beyond keeping it clean and tidy. Joyce itched for her to move the kitchen out of its little scullery space into the back room or build a second bathroom upstairs. (“What for?” asked Zoe.)

— In here, came a muffled voice from the front room.

Pearl must be watching television with the curtains drawn, something Grandfather Deare used to do on weekend afternoons. In the dark, Zoe was taking in some surprises: a mess underfoot she couldn’t quite see, as if she was treading on gritty cloths, and a pall of soured (forbidden) cigarette smoke. She pushed the front room door open with some momentary difficulty (more cloth); the gas fire was on full and the room was stiff with heat. Pearl with bright pink cheeks was on the sofa in her pajamas, wrapped up in Nana Deare’s old green silk eiderdown, which was filthy and leaked feathers and ought to be thrown out. Zoe looked around and saw that the cloth she was trampling underfoot was, in fact, a tangle of clothes, mostly Pearl’s clothes and unidentifiable others, but some of them Zoe’s own (that cream cardigan with the roses; that denim jacket).

— Why didn’t you answer the bell?

— I’m really ill, Pearl said.

— What kind of ill?

— My head hurts, I feel sick, and all kind of weird and shivery.

Zoe was filled with apprehension; her heart contracted to stone in her chest.

— Does the light hurt your head? Is that why you’ve got the curtains closed?

Pearl glanced at them in surprise.

— Not really. I think they were just like that.

Zoe put a hand on her forehead; it was hot, but then the room was very hot. Pearl’s cheeks were wet.

— My love. My precious girl, are you crying? Is it that bad? Tell me exactly where it hurts. She sat down beside her on the sofa, holding her tightly in her arms, drinking in her smell (unwashed, with notes of last night’s perfume and the stale gray of fags, but behind them the incorruptible sweetness of her youth). She kissed her hair (that horrible dyed color, instead of her own rare strawberry!), her cheeks, her forehead. She became aware of Pearl ducking the kisses and rearranging herself inside the embrace so as not to miss a moment of what passed on the television screen. She was watching her video of Truly, Madly, Deeply.

— Mum, get it in perspective. I’m not crying because I’m ill. I’m just crying at the film.

— I don’t know how you can. Haven’t you seen it a hundred times already?

— You’ve got no imagination.

— It strikes me that there are some rather more serious things worth crying about just at the moment.

— You would say that.

— There seems to be quite a mess in here.

— I was going to clear it up, but then I got ill.

— And there’s been smoking. I thought we were agreed that you’d confine it to your room.

— Mum! (Real indignation.) Get off my case! You’ve only been back two seconds and you’ve started nagging me.

— All right, I’m sorry. But you did promise. Remember, this was supposed to be a test of whether I could trust you to be left while I’m away. After last time.

— We’ve been really, really good. We’ve watered all your plants. And we made flapjacks, only they’re all gone, because everyone thought they were so brilliant.

Zoe wanted to ask, We? Who’s we? Who’s everyone? Who’s been here?

But she went instead into the kitchen to make a pot of tea and find the Tylenol and the thermometer. Pearl’s illness probably wasn’t anything alarming. You wouldn’t cry at Truly, Madly, Deeply if you were that bad. She stared around her. The house was in a foul mess. Dishes were piled high in the sink and all over the surfaces, including the bowls and baking tins from the flapjack making, not dealt with yet, even though it looked as though the only flapjack left uneaten was the one trodden into the Portuguese rag rug in the kitchen. There were clothes in here too, all over the back-room floor, including a pair of tights half balled up and inside out, one foot snagged on the end of the bookshelf and the leg stretched around the cane chair as if they were scrambling to get away. There was a heap of blankets tangled with a sleeping bag in one corner. Everywhere there were ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and roaches and bits of torn-up fag papers. Actually, Zoe didn’t own any ashtrays; they had used jam jar lids and plastic bottle tops and her pretty little Moroccan bowls and the blue glass flower vase she had from Grandma Lil, and then in other places they had stubbed the cigarettes out directly on the end of the bookshelf and onto the tiled floor and into the arms of the cane chair. Someone had indeed watered her houseplants, but it looked as though they had done it with the big watering can from the garden, so that earth had splashed out of the pots and up the wall. The door to one of the kitchen units was pulled off its hinges.

— Oh, called Pearl from the front room, the reason for all the washing up is there’s something wrong with the dishwasher. We think a fork’s stuck in it or something.

Zoe went upstairs. Her bed had been slept in, no effort made even to straighten the duvet and cover their traces. Her scarves and jewelry were pulled out and strewn across the top of her chest of drawers, and there were beer cans and Bacardi Breezer bottles and fag ends in here too. In the bathroom a cold and scummy tub hadn’t been emptied, and it looked as though someone had been sick in the toilet; it had been flushed but was still filthy round the rim. She didn’t even venture into Pearl’s room. From the doorway it appeared a dark and roiling sea of bedding with a flotsam and jetsam of bottles, fag ends, discarded food, magazines, makeup, and miscellaneous items (the peacock feathers from the vase on the piano, for example). She went back downstairs and into the front room, where she planted herself in front of the television screen.

— How can you? she said. How can you sit there, knowing I was coming home, while the house is in this state?

Pearl tried to see the picture round her, turned up the sound with the remote.

— Like I told you, I was going to clear up, only then I was ill. Anyway, I thought I could put everything in the dishwasher, but there’s this fork or something. It’s making an awful noise.

— No. That won’t do. I’m afraid I don’t buy that. This isn’t just a matter of not having cleared up yet. Quite apart from the fact that there are hours, hours, of serious cleaning work to do to get this house back to the way it was when I left. I’m talking about what happened here in the first place. This is an abuse of my home and my trust. We said, No parties.

— Mum, like, get it in proportion? It’s not like anyone’s died or anything.

— And as for you being ill, I should think the only thing that’s wrong with you is a serious hangover, judging by the bottles left lying around the place.

— It’s nice to know my own mother is so sympathetic.

— It makes me sick the way you watch this film over and over. I mean when, in real life, have you ever shown any interest in anyone’s suffering outside the immediate orbit of your own tiny circle? What do you care about real disaster? You’d rather sit playing at soap-opera sorrow in an overheated room, calling your friends on your mobile and crying phony tears about it to them.

— It isn’t soap opera. That just goes to show how much you know.

— You and your friends know nothing, you take no interest in the world outside.

— What do you understand about what I feel about anything? When do you ever ask me?

— It’s too pat. Zoe was stony. I’ve heard it all before. You’re young, and therefore it goes without saying that you’re hard done by and misunderstood. But wait a minute. What we’re talking about here is, You trashed my house! You do that and then you whine that I don’t respect you, that I don’t ask you about your feelings? Did you ask me about mine?

— You should listen to yourself one day, hear how you hate me. I’ve had enough of living in this prison house.

— Prison house? What would you know about prison? How can you be so innocent? Don’t you have any shame? Anyway, that’s fine by me, because I’ve had enough of you living here too.

— I’m going to go to Dad’s.

— To Dad’s? Zoe gave a hard hoot of laughter. Oh, yes, wonderful, go to Dad’s. I love it. Let’s see how you two get along.

— He said I could come and stay anytime.

— Then pack your bags. Put your clothes on and pack your bags. Do it now, right now. I’ll give you a lift to the station. I don’t see why he shouldn’t have to put up with you for a while.

— But I’m really ill.

— I don’t believe you.

Zoe stopped the video, threw open the window, and turned off the fire. Pearl stormed resentfully out of the room to run herself a fresh bath. From downstairs Zoe heard a sequence of indignant conversations on her mobile. Presumably one of them was to Simon. (Whatever had Pearl been telling him that had made him offer to have her to stay?) Zoe would be figuring in all these calls as an unfeeling villain. But until she dropped Pearl off at the station she was adamant, she didn’t falter. Then when she fixed her eyes on the retreating back as Pearl pushed through the doors to buy her ticket for Oxford — backpack slung jauntily on one shoulder, dressed up so bravely and deliberately to meet the world with her painted eyes and her costume of bright colors, ripped jeans, embroidered patchwork cap — Zoe had a vision of things from a different angle, and the mess in the house seemed only a temporary problem. But there were taxis queued to stop behind her and she couldn’t wait; she had to pull out and drive on; she couldn’t jump out of the car and run after Pearl and tell her that after all she loved her more than anything on earth.

* * *

— What if she was really ill? zoe asked joyce. (she had stopped by at her mother’s house on the way back from the station.) What if I’ve turned her out of her own home and there’s something seriously wrong with her?

Joyce was ironing Ray’s shirts.

— You can phone Simon and ask him how she is when she gets there.

— I’m horrible. I’m so horrible.

Zoe nursed her coffee cup in her hands as if she were cold; her face was haggard with bruise-colored swellings under her eyes. Joyce worried about her; she gave too much of herself to her work. Joyce was proud when she saw her daughter’s name in the national papers, but she saw how Zoe was eaten up with nervous energy when she had to do one of these big lectures.

— Of course you’re not horrible. Pearl’s impossible. I feel badly myself because I said I’d keep an eye on things. But when I popped in yesterday morning it didn’t look too awful, and she promised me she was going to tidy up. They must have had a party there last night.

— You wouldn’t ever have turned me or Daniel out on the street.

— In Daniel’s case it would probably have been very good for him. How was he?

— Really fine. We had a nice time. You know they’ve got some new girl working for them? From Romania.

— Oh, dear. I wonder what happened to the last one. Those poor little boys.

— I suppose working for Flavia is better than being trafficked here as a sex slave.

— Marginally, perhaps.

— All the way home I was planning on a hot bath. That’s why I went so mad. A long and mindless soak.

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

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

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

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

Joyce folded a shirt carefully.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

— Martha’s in the States.

— Oh, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Precisely. I’m interested as to why.

— Oh.

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

— You mean what’s happening at the moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Pearl didn’t get out of bed until well after midday. This should have given Simon a perfect opportunity to get on with his work. However, her mere presence in the flat was somehow catastrophically disruptive. He kept imagining he heard her stirring or calling for him. Somehow the idea of her with her pink hair and her nose stud and her backpack full of female apparatus spilling out into his space prevented him from concentrating (she had explained one surgical-looking item in all seriousness to him as an “eyelash curler”). He gave up trying to push ahead with the chapter of his book and turned instead to reading through a PhD thesis for which he was the external examiner. That was much easier. Pearl could have been one of his students. It was easier to think about her in relation to them. He liked it when the students had pink hair and piercings; he admired their irreverence for what was natural. He didn’t know why he found it disconcerting in his own daughter.

When Pearl did eventually get up, to Simon’s dismay she turned the television on. He had a digital set — widescreen, with the sound wired up to come through his B and W speakers — but he didn’t watch it often and certainly never, ever, in the daytime. (Martha watched things on it that astonished him; he found her unapologetic assertion of a taste for Ally McBeal and Sex in the City provocative and intriguing, but it also made him glad she had kept her own place.) Pearl didn’t have the television on particularly loud, but she didn’t shut the door, and the sound inserted itself like a trip wire between him and the furtive argument of this thesis, which was escaping from him through a dense underbrush of language. (It wasn’t very good: on Dickens and carnival, a stale theme. These enthusiasts for charivari were the same people, no doubt, who complained about joyriders and lager louts.) He found himself trying to determine from the patterns of speech and laughter what it was that Pearl was watching. It must be a chat show. You could recognize the rhythms of inanity without even hearing the words.

He went to ask her to turn the sound down and keep the door shut. She was still in her baggy stretch nightshirt, eating toast smothered in chocolate spread on his white-covered sofa. For a ghostly moment he heard his mother’s words in the room. “Don’t make any marks, will you?” At least he didn’t actually speak them.

— Grotesque, isn’t it? he said instead, after stopping to watch for a moment. “Forgive us for running our item on propagating bonsai in the home, which we know is overshadowed by September’s tragic events, but after all life must go on.” I’ll bet “overshadowed” is doing overtime, isn’t it? And “spirit”? And “inextinguishable”?

Pearl looked at him, pausing with her toast held ready for a bite.

— But what happened was terrible. How else could they talk about it?

— It doesn’t occur to you that if they meant it, if they really meant it, they could just cut the item? Cut the whole show. Turn their backs on the cameras and cover their faces with their hands. We could just contemplate darkness for a few months. It might do us good.

She looked bemused, and then she shrugged.

— But I suppose people expect there to be television. I mean, they might panic, if they turned it on and it wasn’t there.

He contemplated continuing the argument with her but decided that the abysses of her blankness might be too deep. He was not ready quite yet to navigate them with her; he was too afraid of what he might not find.

— No doubt, he said. No doubt there would be panic.

And he went back to the thesis and worked on it for another twenty minutes, until he began to wonder guiltily whether she might need hot drinks or instructions in how to work the shower. Or perhaps she had come to him because she wanted to confess to him, to consult him. Of course if that were the case she should really have got up to have breakfast with him; they might have talked then. She could not expect him to interrupt his work. On the other hand, he was only marking a student thesis. He had put aside his book, his “real” work. He had made his preparations for the week’s teaching. It could not matter if he broke with his routine for just one day. (Martha accused him of living like a monk, with his rigid routines. “In some respects,” she said. “Although a very licentious monk.”)

He got up to suggest that they go out to tea. Wasn’t that what fathers did? He would buy Pearl tea. He would take her somewhere done up to look old-fashioned, she would think Oxford was a charming place, he would ply her with cake, she would consume it with youth’s insatiable appetite for sweet things, and she would artlessly open up to him her life, her reasons for disenchantment with her education, her complaints against her mother. However, when he opened the door to his study he heard that she was talking: not to herself — as he imagined for one disorienting moment (“she’s mad, she’s actually talking to the television”) — but on her mobile phone. Although she was loud with that particular autistic loudness of the mobile phone user, he could not catch exactly what she was saying. The rhythms of her talk were stagey and exaggerated; she sounded like the television she had been watching. He took a few steps along the passage, treading softly on the thick carpet. He had a need to know how his daughter’s mind worked when she was unguarded and apart from him. He could hear her when he stood close up to the closed door.

— My dad’s bought all this amazing stuff at the supermarket because he knew I was coming? she was saying, in an excited, swollen voice that rose up as if into a question at the end of almost every sentence. Like orange squash and chocolate spread and Dairylea cheese? They’re all the things I used to like when I was eight, it’s really funny! He’s so weird.

He hardly recognized himself, transformed into that funny “dad.”

— I haven’t got any clothes, she wouldn’t give me any time to pack, I’ve only got a really weird selection of things and none of them go together, so I won’t be able to go out of the door at all. She was really rabid; she just kind of stood over me while I packed up. I was scared, I was just thinking, Oh, my God, put anything in, I just wanna get out of here. So I’ve brought, like, no socks and two bottles of black nail polish?

Was she flirting? Was she talking to a girlfriend or a boy? She seemed to be making such efforts to please, to go through the hyperactive motions of this elaborated code, its language evacuated of apparent meaning. He could make no connection between this material of her life and what he remembered of himself when he was her age. Where had she learned to be so false? Disapproval overwhelmed him, like something rising in his throat; he withdrew soundlessly and went back to try and concentrate on the thesis in his study. She had left chocolate marks on his white sofa. He found himself scrubbing at them later with 1001 upholstery cleaner (the same stuff his mother used to use), when Pearl went out. He didn’t know where she had gone. She hadn’t called out any message before she banged the front door of the flat shut behind her.

* * *

When simon thought back now to his first book (the one on prisons and fictions that had been adapted from his PhD thesis) and to those obsessive writings and rewritings of it that had detained him for far too long, he saw now, in proportion to their results, he understood that he had been trying to disguise himself progressively further and further inside a language working as a self-enclosed system, purged of the treachery of personality. He knew now that such a language wasn’t possible. Literary criticism wasn’t physics. (He also thought that the book was too dependent on Foucauldian modelings of culture and power, of which he had since become more skeptical.) His new book on the representations of music in prose fiction, which he had been working on already for three years, was going to be much riper and warmer, was going to make the books that preceded it (the prisons book, the one on Dickens’s irony, the little one on the history of Madame Bovary in English) look like cautious apprenticeship pieces. He thought of it as a reclamation in a renewed language of some of the humanists’ old ground: a demonstration of a recovered trust, finally, in the best of the culture he was heir to. He had felt able, as he experimented with first drafts of sections on Tolstoy’s Kreuzer Sonata and Joyce’s The Dead, to use the words of value judgment he had once trained himself scrupulously to resist; he wrote about “greatness,” and “mastery,” and even used (carefully, and with explication) the term “classic.”

It wasn’t perfectly clear to him, given his deep confidence in it, why the writing of the book had stalled, just recently, in the few weeks since he and Martha came back from their visit with friends in Uppsala. It didn’t even seem to be an intellectual problem but more of a physical one. When he sat for the prescribed hours at his desk, it wasn’t that the complexity of his argument defeated him or that he was trying to do too much (as Martha somewhat bruisingly suggested); what he felt was a lassitude, a paralyzing indifference to adding one word more to what was already on his screen. He felt as if the book was written already somehow: the effort was expended, he was on the other side of it, and he didn’t have it in him to toil back up to the top of the mountain of his argument. He found himself playing for ages with a couple of sentences or scrolling up and down through what he’d finished, fiddling with the syntax, pouncing on awkward repetitions. In order to forge forward, he knew that something in the mind must tense itself: reject peripheral stimuli, lunge into new words, persist in pursuit of the idea and not let go. And suddenly he felt bored with that virtuous conquest which was his life’s story.

Pearl’s arrival was the last straw; or she was his convenient pretext. The mess she left around the flat stunned him. He was incredulous at how much time she spent in empty chatter with her friends at home on her mobile phone. He found himself actually counting on his watch the hours she spent watching television. An outraged awareness of the dissipation, the indiscipline, the pointlessness of her life would float like a fog between his eyes and the screen he was supposed to be focused upon. She spent money like water — his money — then asked him for more in a tone that presupposed her right and the bottomlessness of his responsibility to provide. Although he asked her not to smoke in the flat, he knew she sometimes did; he smelled it and found the fag ends carelessly half buried in the waste bin. She went out “shopping” every day (she claimed she was looking for a job too); even Martha, who was quite capable of using that horrible verb “to shop” without irony, didn’t indulge in it very often. If he didn’t quarrel with Pearl, not yet, not in their first week, it was because he saw any domestic bickering as the ultimate extension of the banality he couldn’t bear.

He did once mildly reproach her for cutting food on the kitchen surfaces without a board, leaving knife marks.

— Oh, God! You’re just like Mum, always getting at me! she’d snapped, with such flagrant injustice (it really was the very first complaint he’d made) that he’d been deflected from persisting by her sheer illogic.

He was curious as to how Zoe had managed things at home; he wondered what Pearl’s perceptions of her mother were. Zoe’s restless conscientiousness made her perpetually strained; he could imagine how that was hard on a child. And when Pearl was small Zoe had surely been too passionately and unremittingly attached to her, too anxiously guilty about managing employment and motherhood together. Pearl hadn’t responded well to that anxiety. He wondered if his daughter wasn’t temperamentally more like himself. In truth, he had probably felt flattered, even vindicated, when Pearl called him and asked to take refuge with him. It was difficult to resist attributing some of what he deplored in Pearl’s attitude to flaws in her mother’s system of child-raising.

Zoe phoned Pearl at Simon’s almost every day; Pearl was blithely offhand in response.

— No, I’m all right, she said. No, don’t come up, there’s no need.… No, it’s OK, I’m chilling out, it’s cool.

When he talked to Zoe himself she was very brisk.

— I’m busy, she told him. I’ve got a couple of articles to write, I’m teaching two new courses, and there’s a lecture in the States to prepare for, as well as the book. As you can imagine, this all feels rather urgent at the moment, in the context of what’s happening. So long as she’s OK with you. I’m amazed how much I can get done, with the house to myself. She’s missing her classes at college, but to be perfectly honest, with the levels of attendance she was managing last year, I don’t know why she was bothering with it at all.

Above all, Simon wanted to resist falling into Zoe’s pattern of conflict with Pearl, a cycle of repudiation and reconciliation she couldn’t break. He never wanted to hear his own voice rising in Zoe’s futility of indignant allegation: “She did this; she said that; I told her, once and for all; I really thought we were getting somewhere this time, but then last night she.…” He tried to focus his mind instead on the phenomenon of Pearl’s generation, so technologically well equipped, so well fed, so beset with innumerable trivial stimuli: the music that poured in at their ears, the flashing dancing pictures in front of their eyes, their swollen pay packets, the incitements to purchase and consume on every side, the exposed flesh promiscuously, blandly available everywhere (he couldn’t bear to look at the expanse of tender pale belly that Pearl bared bravely, even going to town, even in the middle of the afternoon).

He speculated as to what drugs she took when she was with her friends. He probed to see what in the world she knew about. She didn’t know the dates of the World Wars. She didn’t have any second language. She didn’t know who Stravinsky was, or Metternich, or Frantz Fanon, although she had vague ideas about Lenin and Germaine Greer (“Isn’t she some kind of feminist?”). She thought the Black Sea was “somewhere in Africa,” and she had never heard of the World Bank. Except when she was engaged in dialogue with her friends she spoke moderately clear English, although it was tainted with the cultish slang of the American teens. She didn’t seem to have read anything; astonishingly, when he asked her for her favorite book, she said it was To Kill a Mockingbird; how had that dinosaur of stuffy hopeful decency somehow endured into the age of techno and Ecstasy? Presumably it was something she had had to read at school.

As long as Simon didn’t criticize and was compliant, Pearl played at being sweet with him. She made weak dripping mugs of tea and brought them in to where he was working (he didn’t really drink tea; Zoe’s house would be a tea-drinking house, it went with the vegetarianism and the good causes). Because he couldn’t write what he ought to be writing, he was busying himself instead with reading and making notes he knew he didn’t need; to Pearl it must look as if all was as usual with the scholar in his study.

— You ought to get out more, Simon, she said. Apart from work and driving to the supermarket, you’ve been locked up in here with your books all week.

— I’ve been swimming, he replied defensively. (He went every day and did twenty lengths.) She was right, the air among his heaps of papers was stale.

— Just because Martha isn’t around, it doesn’t mean you have to shut yourself away.

— She says I’m a monk. Do you think I’m a monk?

She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, considering.

— You are going just a teeny bit bald, on top here.

— No. No, I’m not. He anxiously felt.

Then he had to go and inspect in the bathroom mirror; she held his shaving mirror up behind for him.

— It’s only a very, very small patch, she assured him.

— Good God, you’d need a magnifying glass.

He didn’t like it, though, even the small patch. He wondered what Pearl saw when she looked at him. Perhaps he seemed ancient to her. He hadn’t seriously thought much about what it meant to be growing older. Without children to hand, he had not had any markers against which to test how he appeared and whether he was showing the beginnings of absurdity.

He took her out to dinner at Le Petit Blanc. She spent hours dressing up for it in some of the new clothes she’d bought for herself with his money. She looked vivid and extravagant in a green top sewn with sequins cut low across her pushed-up breasts and some sort of short jacket with a fur trim. There were green combs in her pink hair. Her face was wide and slightly pasty (he could see a spot she had tried to cover with makeup); her pouting mouth with its swollen lower lip was glossy with dark paint; her eyes, drawn all around with kohl, were the real beauty of her face, commanding and deep-lidded. Girls her age did themselves up like this to attract attention and then froze rigid in the glare of it. He wondered what her contemporaries thought of her, whether the boys found her attractive or too overpowering. He knew there had been boyfriends, none of them “serious.” He thought she might be the kind of girl who has to wait until she’s older to generate passion in men.

If he was spotted by anyone he knew, would they guess Pearl was his daughter? They might decide disapprovingly that he was taking out one of his students. She grew talkative after several glasses of wine, although he still detected something guarded in her, a certain bright falsity of manner like a defense, clichés of expression behind which she eluded him. She never for one moment lost awareness of the crowd of others in the restaurant. When she smoked a cigarette she did it with studied nonchalance, as if she’d been practicing. She told him she was thinking of finding a job and taking a year off before starting her A-levels again.

— I need a break, she said.

He didn’t ask, A break from what exactly? What have you actually ever done?

— I’d like to travel.

— Travel’s OK, he said, but education’s better. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be foolish. Knowledge is power, you know. I would want to find out what was going on. I would want to learn to understand it.

She looked down into her dessert, poking it with her spoon, blushing.

— I’m not so bad as you think. I did know where the Black Sea was, really, I just forgot. And I read a lot, honestly. I just said To Kill a Mockingbird because I thought it was something you’d approve of.

On their way home she slipped her arm into his and clung to him (perhaps it was the drink, perhaps he was walking too fast for her heels). She asked him to lend her one of his books.

— With all of those you’ve got, she said, there must be something I would like.

He thought about it, and when they were home he pulled down for her his copy of Turgenev’s First Love.

* * *

After a couple of weeks, pearl got a job working at virgin Records. She was taught to work the tills and the machine for the debit cards; then she stood behind a counter and took money for goods, over and over, all day long. She said it was boring but OK. A boy began to ring her at home, sometimes on the land line, which Simon answered, hearing his own voice frigid with hostility.

— I’ll just call her. Who did you say it was?

— Tell her it’s Lozzy.

The voice was educated, slurred, and complacent. In Oxford it was perfectly possible for people with those voices to work on the tills in chain stores. Simon couldn’t bring himself to repeat this absurd name to Pearl; he only informed her that she was wanted on the phone. He was swelling in fact with a violent and no doubt irrational mistrust of anyone who came after his daughter. He couldn’t believe that they could want her for herself, that she wasn’t being duped.

Pearl went out in the evenings, perhaps to meet Lozzy or perhaps other friends she had made at work. Simon told her to take care; he said he would be happy to come in the car to pick her up later, if she gave him a ring; he asked her what time she would be back. She threw him a fierce look as abrupt as a snap at his hand.

— Simon! Get off my back!

No one had spoken to him, ever, with such contempt.

He lay awake, listening for her to come home. Sometimes he didn’t hear her key in the door until two or three in the morning. One night he heard her and Lozzy come in together (presumably it was Lozzy? was it worse if it was someone else?), although they must have been tiptoeing scrupulously, taking much more elaborate care than she usually took to be quiet and not wake him. What made him know they were there was not even really distinct sound at all, it was more like the liquid overflow of something warm and sweet; at one point a low bubble of laughter erupted in Pearl’s voice, as if they were stumbling into each other in the dark in the passage, clinging to each other, stifling their mirth in each other’s clothes. Thank God the spare room was at the other end of the flat, the carpets were thick, and the old doors were heavy; there was no chance that he would hear them once they were in there. He strained his ears to make sure he was not hearing them, nonetheless.

That was it.

That was enough. She would have to go, if he was reduced to the grotesquerie of listening out for creaking bedsprings, like some greasy landlady in a northern realist novel. In the morning he lurked in his room, monitoring the progress of their furtive bathroom visits and breakfasting, then bursting out at a moment calculated to confront Lozzy face-to-face before they left for their day behind the counter. They both started guiltily where they were drinking tea in the kitchen, looking wan and used up (too much bed and not enough sleep; hadn’t that been the idiotic joke when he was a teenager?). He could see the beginnings of a sore beside Pearl’s lip. Lozzy was worse even than Simon had imagined: he had one of those white cocky faces, with a turned-up nose, thin lips rather full with blood, and rings in his eyebrows. His hair was cropped to a tight fuzz over his skull, dyed yellow.

— Hi there. Lozzy got in first before Simon said anything.

— Lozzy missed his last bus home, lied Pearl lamely. I said you wouldn’t mind if he slept on my floor.

He did mind. But as there were no words in which he could imagine conveying this without indignity, he silently tested the kettle (empty), filled it splashily at the tap, felt an awareness in his shoulder blades that behind his back they were exchanging conspiratorially amused looks.

Simon’s own sleep patterns started to disintegrate. He had thought he left his childhood insomnia behind him (gentle-handed Ros, whom he had been involved with for a while a few years ago, had been a hypnotherapist and had done wonders with him, for all his skepticism). Now it returned to sap his days and nights of goodness and reason. Because of the agonized absurdity of his lying awake at night waiting for Pearl, he once or twice even went out walking round the streets in the small hours as he had done when he was young. Then during the day, because he wasn’t young anymore, he found his mind was clogged with tiredness; he even laid his head down sometimes on his arms and slept in front of the humming screen of his computer. He was astonished at how far, far down the soul could drop out of such a makeshift and snatched repose; hauling it up to consciousness again, when guilt roused him after fifteen or twenty minutes, felt like pulling his resisting heart out of a deep well. His dreams in the instant he tore free seemed voluminous, significant, absorbing; he ached to drop back into them.

How was he supposed to act with Pearl? The first time they crossed paths after his encounter with Lozzy, she looked at him as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t know how to. Had he presided ingloriously over his daughter’s deflowering? Surely not; he had a distinct memory of Zoe’s telling him, although he hadn’t in the least wanted to hear it, that she and Pearl had talked about which contraception Pearl was using. No doubt Zoe had also told him which this was, although he had chosen not to remember that (and certainly wasn’t going to ask her about it now). When he put a wash in the machine, he found blood-stained knickers in the laundry basket, but then there were more straightforward explanations for that than the loss of anyone’s virginity (and he wasn’t going to ask Pearl about her periods either, although he did notice that over a few days the contents of the box of Tampax Martha kept in his bathroom was depleted). He prowled around in the spare room when Pearl was out and he was meant to be working. He picked up a book with a flowery cloth cover that might have been a diary; he weighed it in his hands and held it for some long minutes but didn’t open it, afraid of what he might read in there about himself, or about a whole kind of living he did not recognize and could not understand. He went away into the kitchen and made himself coffee and took up his collection of Adorno’s essays on music, forcing himself to concentrate on these and not to wonder what Pearl might have written. He was grateful for the teaching and for the ordinary administrative busyness that got him out of the flat and into his office in college. He looked forward to Martha’s return; this surely would fill up his days and steady him. There was something unseemly in his allowing his private angst to take up so much space in his thoughts at a time when the whole world was upside down.

— What did you make of the Turgenev? he asked Pearl tentatively.

— Yeah, I really liked it, it was so sad, she said. I guessed what was going to happen though, right from the first time his father saw the princess in the garden.

— Interesting that of all the Russians it is the Westernizing believer in enlightenment and progress who writes the saddest stories.

— Are they Russian? I thought that they were French. Didn’t they keep saying things in French?

He explained to her about the function of French-speaking in nineteenth-century aristocratic Russia. He also pointed out that the story was set in the country outside Moscow. Did she think that Moscow was in France?

— Oh, I never read the place names. My eye just sort of glances over them.

— I recommend you train yourself to glance back.

— The only bit I didn’t like was the end. I didn’t understand why she let herself be beaten. She kissed her arm where he hit her with his whip. That’s gross.

Simon considered.

— Perhaps your generation of women really won’t ever know about the kind of power that Zinaida has at the beginning; on license, for just as long as she’s young and beautiful and hasn’t given herself to anyone. The trouble is, it only makes fools out of the men; she can’t wait to exchange it for submission to a man worthy of mastering her. I suppose that arrangement sounds fairly horrible to you?

— It doesn’t make her very happy.

— It doesn’t make him very happy either. I’m not sure that happiness is quite the point.

— Why can’t they just be equals?

— Nowadays it would be possible to hope they could, of course. And you are quite right to wish for it. Everyone would be happier. Who would dare to put a name to what might be lost, now that we are inventing new patterns for men’s and women’s behavior? Only one wonders sometimes whether women will really want these bland new men that they have engineered.

— I shouldn’t worry about it, Pearl said. There’s probably a way to go yet, anyway, before we get to bland.

Another day when he was in her room he found English and history essays she must have done for her teachers at the sixth-form college, stuffed crumpled in the bottom of her backpack. (Left there out of profound indifference to such a form of work as if it were mere waste paper, or brought in case she dared to show them to him?) These he read greedily on the spot, frowning at the spelling, reliving the arguments he had had with Zoe when he had offered to pay for Pearl to go to private school. (“How can you?” Zoe had said. “When I think of what you used to profess to believe, once.” He wondered sometimes how he had ever tolerated Zoe’s righteousness, unambiguous as a ringing bell, even for the few years they had lived together.) If Pearl had gone to private school, she would have done better than this raw and unpolished work. There were gleams here and there, however, of something audacious and intelligent, unspoiled. Perhaps if she had gone to private school she would have been more knowing and less true. He was surprised by her penetration of some godawful sentimental-feminist poem she’d been given to analyze; shaken, even, as if he’d stumbled on something she’d concealed from him.

* * *

Martha came back. her summer of research work in the archives had gone well (this was for her book on women and politics in eighteenth-century America). She was surprised to find Pearl still around. Simon had told her on the phone that she was staying, but not for how long. Martha was less warm with her than she had been when Pearl had visited once or twice before for the weekend. She moved some clothes and bits and pieces out of his flat back into her own. When they made love it was at her place, and then Simon didn’t want to sleep the night there; he said he didn’t like to leave Pearl on her own.

Martha sat up in bed with the sheet over her breasts and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. Her hair was thick and very dark, as near as brown can come to black, with rich red lights in it. She wore it long, curling loose halfway down her back. She gave him a glance deep with accumulated questions; her eyes were brown too, almond-shaped and slanting (she had a Portuguese grandmother).

— It strikes me, she said, that Pearl is perfectly capable of looking after herself.

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

— I think I ought to be there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

— What is it? he whispered awkwardly.

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

— Should I go away?

She shook her head in her hands, sobbing.

— It’s nothing.

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

— Well, evidently it’s not nothing.

— Lozzy took me out in his car after work.

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

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

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

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

— Then we saw this dead fox beside the road.

— And?

She renewed her sobbing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grew more quiet.

— Did you? What kind of animal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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