Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— So do I.

They sat in the backseat of the car: Uncle Dick had spread out a towel, so that they wouldn’t make wet marks on his upholstery. He lectured them about looking after themselves and having some self-respect; because he couldn’t turn round to speak to them, the words seemed to emanate from his dark, stiff back. At some level they were genuinely impressed by his concern. As a matter of fact, a few days before, a couple of lorry drivers had given them a lift to the beach and when they got out one of them had grabbed Helena’s hand and tried to put it on his trousers, until his friend swore at them and drove on.

But Joyce was also exhilarated by Uncle Dick’s very exasperation and his fear for them. If there was danger, then that meant you counted for something. You had at least the power — the power that Vera and Lil didn’t have — to disconcert him, to make him mutter to himself and drive with impatient thwarted accelerations and brakings. Behind the sternness of his back in its dark hot serge, the girls sat basking in the miracle of their new costumes, which were hardly wet, and which they somehow knew he both wanted and didn’t want to look at.

One Friday in November, Kay was hot and whining and clung to Lil. In the evening she was worse, and when they telephoned the doctor and described her symptoms he told them to take her straight to the hospital. Uncle Dick drove; Vera sat in the front seat, and the other children saw Lil put Kay into her arms, wrapped in one of the American quilts. They felt the drama of the occasion, but it did not occur to them that Kay would not come back. Just after the car had driven off they found her bit of old sucky blanket lying on the kitchen floor, and Martin ran with it along the lane after the car, but they’d turned onto the road before he could catch up with them. Peter even clowned around after they’d gone, pretending he was ill too, looking up his sleeves and inside his shorts and claiming that each tiny freckle was a rash, squealing and insisting that Lil come to see it, until she rounded on him, asking him if he didn’t have any heart. He then undid his shirt and pretended to look anxiously for it.

Lil got undressed and went to bed eventually, after sitting by the telephone for a couple of hours; this was a kind of endurance in itself, as she feared the thing and hated using it, never knowing which bit she was supposed to speak into (even though Uncle Dick had had it put in for her, so she could place her orders for the delivery vans). It was Joyce who heard the telephone ringing in the deep middle of the night and stumbled downstairs in the dark and then stood with the receiver to her ear in the front room, standing on one leg and then the other because the cold flowing into her bare feet from the stone flags was unendurable.

— We’ve lost her, her aunt said, muffled and different at the other end of the line; and confusedly Joyce thought for a moment she meant it literally, that somehow in the confusion and immensity of the hospital, where Joyce had never been, it might be easy to mislay a little girl, particularly one as stubbornly silent and inconspicuous as Kay.

Lil had heard the telephone too and had followed Joyce down the dark stairs more cautiously. Now she was scratching matches, trying to light a candle.

— Tell your mother we lost her, Aunt Vera was saying angrily.

A match flared up and illuminated Lil’s face just as she heard. Mutely Joyce proffered her the telephone, but Lil waved it off.

— I can’t, I can’t talk to her, she hissed, shaking her head. The match went out.

They stood in a cold dark silence, the sulfur smell livid on the air between them. Joyce understood that this was not just her mother’s usual fear of the phone. Lil was thinking that if she’d been there with Kay, she’d have prevented this, she’d have held it off somehow. It was the way Vera was, so full of opinions, so determined to be different, that brought on catastrophe.

— Is she there? demanded Vera.

— I’ll go and tell her.

— It was meningitis. The doctors gave her antipyretic drugs and antispasmodics. There was nothing they could do to save her. They keep them in the dark, because the light hurts them. I was holding ice to the back of her neck, to help the pain, and then she slipped away. They were bringing the serum from the infirmary to inject her with and the nurse had to tell them she’d gone. About an hour ago. We’ve been sitting with her, your uncle and I.

— All right, I’ll tell her.

Joyce couldn’t begin to find anything appropriate to say to her aunt: she felt herself a strangely neutral quantity, as if she didn’t count, in relation to this disaster. After she hung the receiver back on the telephone, she and Lil went on standing in the dark. Lil gave off an intense heat — she was always opening windows, and she often had to improvise a paper fan to cool herself — and also a special encouraging smell, like sharp dried fruit (this was probably something to do with the cigarettes). Joyce knew both these things intimately, from all the childhood nights she’d slept with her mother, when she was ill or had bad dreams. She would have liked to cling to her now, to be consoled.

— I should have gone with her, Lil wailed softly. I should have been there. They don’t know her like I do. There was nothing wrong with her yesterday. It can’t be right.

Joyce stood awkwardly, not knowing how to help.

Her strongest feeling in the days that followed was embarrassment, and a suspicious jealousy of this grief, dropped down like an extravagant unwanted drama in their lives, spoiling everything. She didn’t even tell anyone about Kay at the College of Art, which she had begun attending that October. When she had to take a day off to go to the funeral, she simply said it was “a relative,” so they all assumed it was someone old and unimportant; and the next morning she was back drinking coffee in a noisy, smoking, joking crowd in the Gardenia Café as if nothing had happened. Pictures of the scene rose in her mind: the small coffin, the stricken adults, Uncle Dick cupping his hand around his eyes to hide his weeping, the dismal Far-mouth cemetery tucked at the end of a raw road that wound past the bonded warehouses from behind the customs offices. She forced them back down again. These two possibilities must be held apart if she was to hang on to this new joyous life where she at last belonged.

* * *

For a week after Kay’s funeral, Vera stayed in her bed. The house was in disarray, the washing wasn’t done, there were no proper meals, the children when they got home from school didn’t change out of their uniforms but sat bickering or pretending to work or play battleships at the table while they listened to the noisy grieving of the two women or the quarreling between Aunt Vera and Uncle Dick. All the doors were left open and nobody tried to hide anything from them; this in itself was frightening. When a confused winter bird got in the house and flew around crashing into the windows, it only seemed like a part of the craziness that had broken in. Guiltily Joyce tried to organize a few things. She brought home potatoes and meat from town and tried to cook stew, only she didn’t know that it took hours for the meat to be tender, so they all sat round the table chewing and then leaving little parcels of pale chewed-up meat around the edges of their plates.

The other children were humbled to discover that Kay, who had been such an ordinary part of their lives and hadn’t ever been much fussed over, could produce such extravagant adult effects. When Vera was crying Peter slammed the door and sat with his fists in his ears (it was a dreadful crying, in a voice of hers they didn’t know, deep and cowlike). One evening Vera came down into the kitchen in her dressing gown with her hair wild and told Lil that she had seen a blue light hovering in her room and had seemed to feel the weight of a child laid in the bed beside her.