When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud

shadow—had been excised long ago from the range of her emotions, after the trouble, the bad time in her youth. She had, for all of a decade now, settled her substantial share of love on God, to whom it rightly belonged. That a smidgen of it, however tiny, should have slipped from her control and latched on to Simon was bewildering and regrettable, and not simply as a point of principle. She knew that Simon could sense her growing confusion, and she knew also that her behaviour was distinctly unprofessional. Sometimes she would be discussing forthcoming interviews with him, or the progress of new staff, when suddenly she would picture him naked in his chair and imagine that she heard him crooning softly to her to climb over the desk. Whereupon she would lose track of the conversation and blush violently, whether more from the titillation or the horror of the fantasy she was never sure. Truth be told, she had never found Simon in the least
physically
attractive: he was squat and runcible and slightly foolish. Which made it all the more upsetting that she couldn’t get him off her mind.
    She had not sinned in anything but thought, and had been praying hard for the restitution of her reason. Everyone—or at least all the women—in her Bible study meetings had been praying too. She had contemplated talking to her minister about it, but felt there would be something odd about a woman of her age and prominence in the church discussing love with the timid Reverend, whose fire was only for God and only in the pulpit, as it should be. Her mother, if she told her, would only hiss and roll her eyes and say ‘poppycock’ to the lot of it, torments and all, the way she said ‘poppycock’ and ‘balderdash’ to God.
    ‘If there was a God,’ Mrs Simpson would say when asked andonly then, ‘You, Virginia, would be married, and Emmy would still be married, and your father would still be living, and the world wouldn’t be warring and starving to death.’ She always said this with a certain amount of satisfaction and sucking of her teeth, as though to imply that she was perfectly content that all these things were so and that she would rather have them that way than contend with her Maker.
    As things stood, Virginia confided very little in her mother. Summer always prompted irritation and distance between them, but this month of June, so hot and anxious, was particularly bad. And not half over yet.
    The television was, as every night, audible on the landing when Virginia got back upstairs. Her mother now sat bathed in the set’s blue light with a tumbler of whisky against her knee.
    ‘You’re not
supposed
to,’ Virginia almost said, but what was the point? Mother was right, she might die tomorrow, and what would the comment do but cause friction? She was resigned to her mother dying unsaved, as resigned, that is, as a good Christian can be, but she did not like the thought that her mother might die while she and Virginia were in the midst of a tiff. For this reason bad terms were to be avoided as often as possible. This said, Mrs Simpson had not shown any signs of ill health, not a day of it, since her double mastectomy many, many years before, for what had proved to be benign tumours anyway.
    As she fried the haddock, Virginia alternated between anticipation and despondency: anticipation at the prospect of her meeting, and a feeling akin to despair over her mother’s silence, a despair she knew to be unreasonable—her mother had always been and would always be moody—but couldn’t help.
    ‘It’s not a fish I much like, haddock,’ was the first thing Mrs Simpson said. ‘Fish does make the flat smell.’
    This was too much. ‘If you would do some shopping, Mother, which you are perfectly capable of, you might find—’
    ‘I was going to say, if you had let me finish, that for all that you’ve cooked it very nicely. I’m quite enjoying it.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘It’s odd about smells,’ Mrs Simpson said.