Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Miss Leonard was working in pastels on a still life she had arranged on a table for one of her classes: two jugs glazed in thick yellow against a scrap of oriental rug with a couple of lemons. She gave her a rapid unimpressed bird glance.

— I thought you were one of the brainy ones?

— Oh no, not really. Joyce blushed.

— So why on earth do you want to go to art school? Apart from being too stupid to do anything else?

— Well, I love art, of course.

One skeptical eyebrow went up: the eyes flickered rapidly, assessingly, between the lemons and her paper.

— Oh, don’t love art. That’s sounds frightfully high-minded. You’ll never make a living at it, you know.

Joyce was shocked.

— I never dreamed I could make a living!

— You have to teach, or else you do illustrating, if you can get it. Unless of course you’re one of the lucky few. The ones who’ve really got it. Whatever it is. Talent, genius, originality, the right friends in the right places.

— What it is, really, said Joyce, is that I love these things. I’ve never seen things like these before.

Miss Leonard looked at her blankly. Then, as if she had forgotten it existed, she cast a surprised glance round the room full of the treasures that had pleased her eye.

— Oh. I see.

She put down her crayon and went over to shelves piled with a miscellany of crockery, topped with pieces of driftwood and a couple of ostrich feathers.

— Come and feel these, she said.

Anxiously, Joyce took one of the big flat dishes from her. Miss Leonard brushed off the dust with the side of her hand.

— Do you like them?

The dish was heavy, the clay half an inch thick; the uneven green glaze was decorated with swirls of brown so freely drawn you could see the marks of the brush hairs. Joyce could hardly understand a way of making things that was so opposite to the one she had been brought up to admire: her mother’s best tea set, for example, where precision and delicate finish were everything and the making process was tidied secretively out of sight.

— I love them, she said.

— They come from Portugal. In Portugal the sun is hot, the people live out of doors so much more, they drink wine and eat fish cooked with olive oil and tomatoes and spices and garlic, off dishes like these. Their houses are often crumbling and untidy, but inside and even outside they are covered with locally made tiles.

She took away the dish and gave Joyce a handful of tiles, each one different. They were in glowing colors, blues and reds and yellows: mostly patterns but some pictures, a fish and a bird, drawn as crudely and casually as a child might draw them. They didn’t even seem quite perfectly square.

— You should go there, Miss Leonard said. Or Italy. You should go to Italy too. You should eat pasta asciutta and drink Chianti. Children suffer under a blight of ugliness in this country. What’s for dinner today, for example? Can you smell it? You usually can up here. Boiled liver and cabbage? Boiled cod and white sauce? No wonder their paintings are ugly.

Miss Leonard was suddenly impatient with Joyce. She picked up the drawing of the shell as if it exasperated her and scribbled on it with a piece of charcoal, crudely, exaggerating the horns of the shell with bold black Vs.

— Don’t be meek, she said. That’s what I can’t bear. Boiled cod and white sauce.

* * *

The making of Aunt Vera’s outfit for ladies’ night was fraught with problems. Both fabrics were difficult to cut and sew. Lil needed pinking shears and didn’t have any. She cut the three-quarter-length sleeves of the jacket in one with the bodice and then let in gussets under the arms, but the gussets were difficult and puckered on the corners. Nonetheless, there was a certain gathering excitement in the week or so while the dressmaking was advancing. It was full summer now. There were rust-colored weeds and shaggy old-man’s beard among the tall mauve grasses. The full-grown leaves on the trees lolled in the heat and showed their gray undersides, the rhines were rank and shallow.

Aunt Vera stood on the kitchen table for Lil to do the hem. The floor was strewn with scraps of cloth and ends of thread and pins. They were still not sure how the outfit finally looked. Too many bits were provisional, pinned or unfinished, and then Vera inside it was too obviously her ordinary self, her hair untidy, her face long and tired with bruise-colored pouches under the eyes. She was scowling and fretting at being kept prisoner while Lil fussed. Joyce hoped something different would happen when she did up her hair, powdered her skin, put on lipstick and scent, put in her garnet earrings.

Meanwhile, she was testing Joyce on her English history. She told an anecdote about Palmerston that Joyce had heard from her before, in school. Palmerston said, “There are only three people in the world who have understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. One’s dead, one’s mad, and I’ve forgotten.” There were other stories about Palmerston: how he cheered when he heard that the London dockers put a Hungarian general in a barrel and rolled him down a hill, and how he was fit enough to vault over a gate the day before he died. Vera had favorites among the men in history. When she talked about them her voice was coy, as if she were sharing some kind of flirtatious joke.

Into the indoor quiet erupted Peter and Kay with news that they had caught an eel, Martin following importantly with an enamel bucket, which he set down on the floor for everyone to admire. The eel stirring in its dark coils in the bit of muddy water was like a sight of something urgent and shameful that was best kept hidden. Ann, who had been sitting on the low stool learning her lines for the pageant, was fearless with animals and wanted to reach in the bucket and touch the eel, but Lil said she’d get an electric shock.

— It’s the wrong kind of eel, said Peter impatiently, but he held himself well back and peered into the bucket with excited loathing, from a respectful distance.

— Take it away, children, said Lil, removing a mouthful of pins. I do not want that dirty creature anywhere near this precious sewing.

— We could eat it, said Martin, trying to sound at his most reasonable and practical.

— We could not, said Lil. If you think for one moment I’m going to grapple with that blinking thing and kill it and gut it, not even knowing whether it’s habitable or not.…

— You don’t mean habitable, said Peter, but there was relief in his voice.

There came the sounds of Uncle Dick’s car negotiating the tormenting ruts of the lane. Lil and Vera looked at each other.

— Can we keep it as a pet? said Martin. Please? He didn’t seriously expect an answer.

— D’you want him to see? said Lil to Vera.

— Heavens, Lillie, what do I care what he sees? Anyone’d think I was a bride in a wedding dress!

Obediently Lil went on pinning, while Vera on the table moved stiffly round for her as if she were on an old slow turntable. The children took the eel outside, Ann following them, chirruping coaxingly into the bucket. She was wearing her Mary Queen of Scots headdress, her heart-shaped face with its sly dark eyes uncharacteristically demure under its little gothic vault. There was a pause while in the yard Uncle Dick duly admired the eel. He sounded as if he was in a good humor. He blocked the light, standing in the doorway, with Kay in his arms; Lil lifted her head up from her concentration on the hem.

— What d’you think, Dick?

He was blinking in the shadows after the glare outdoors. Kay, who with no prompting or encouragement adored her father, had laid her head on his shoulder and was fingering his lapel while she sucked her thumb.