Everything Will Be All Right (37 page)

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.