Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— You know about this stuff. I suppose you’ll say it was some sort of sign.

— I wish she would come to me, said Lil dully. I can’t feel anything.

— Is that the next thing? asked Vera. Am I going to go mad? Am I going to start seeing visions and believing in spirits?

Then on the morning she was supposed to return to Amery-James she got up early and washed and dressed in her gray suit absolutely as usual, and pinned up her hair without a word, her brown complexion bleached, her lips pale, her eyes looking swimming and full not because she was weeping but because of how the flesh had fallen away from her face. Ann reported that at school the girls were frightened to do the least thing in lessons to cross her; a lugubrious cult grew up around her bereavement. Joyce was disgusted when she discovered that Ann had taken a photograph of Kay into school to pass around. Some girls had actually shed tears over it.

When Joyce was rummaging in Lil’s drawer one morning, wanting to borrow her pair of black kid gloves, she found Kay’s scrap of sucky blanket.

— Shouldn’t you give this to Auntie Vera? she said.

— She’s never asked me for it. She’s never thought about it.

It hadn’t been washed and still had its grubby salty smell.

— Don’t tell her I’ve got it, Lil said. I don’t see why I shouldn’t keep something. It’s nothing anybody else could want. But no doubt she’d find some way of putting me in the wrong over it.

She was sitting at her dressing table but not combing her hair or patting Nivea into her cheeks. Joyce put the bit of blanket away where she had found it, under the pretty perfectly pressed blouses, satin or with lace collars or embroidery, that were never worn. She wondered what her mother did all day at home without Kay to look after. When they all drove off to the city in the Austin in the mornings (Martin had after all got his place at the Cathedral School and was already stealing chemicals from the science labs to make explosives at home), there was a bend in the lane where they used to look back and wave to Lil and Kay. Now Lil didn’t even come out to see them off.

To Joyce’s dismay, when she talked about the possibility of renting a flat in the city for her second year at college, Lil said she thought it was a good idea and she would bring Ann and Martin and come and live with her.

— I could get a little job to help us all out: with that and the pension we could manage fine.

— Is Aunt Vera’s new house ready for her then?

— I hope she isn’t building any hopes on that. Vera’ll never see the inside of that house. It’s time she faced up to certain things.

It was true that they hadn’t seen much of Uncle Dick since Kay died, after the first few days. When Vera was in her worst state, staying in bed all day and refusing to eat, he came once and went into the bedroom and brought out all his suits and ties. He didn’t speak to any of them. Peter hated him. Joyce had witnessed a queer sort of fight between them: Peter planting himself with his arms and legs straddled across the kitchen doorway to block his father, saying he wanted to know “what was going on.” He had a long bony face that had somehow never looked right on a child’s body; it was better now he was growing taller and bigger to fit it, but he still couldn’t stop himself from weeping with vexation whenever he was angry. One of the hens scuttled past him into the room, and he kicked at it, missing and raising a flurry of squawks. Uncle Dick tried to push him out of the way and Peter clung to him with his arms and legs, sobbing that he wouldn’t let him go until he told him where he was going.

Uncle Dick had looked at him dully and with disgust.

— Think of your little sister, he said. You should be ashamed of yourself, making a scene like a girl.

* * *

It seemed as though once the doors were opened in that house, any kind of crazy desperate thing could fly inside. In the spring after Kay died, Vera was hatching a plan.

— Your aunt’s got some daft idea, said Lil.

— It’s not an idea, said Vera, it’s my duty.

Joyce stood blinking in the lamplight, in her taffeta striped skirt and her Wellingtons; she was carrying her coat over her arm and her high-heeled brown suede sling-back shoes hooked by their straps over one finger. She had stayed for a party in town and caught the last bus home, which took her as far as Hallam: there she had fished out her Wellingtons from under the hedge where she had hidden them in the morning and walked the last two miles in the moonlight. An owl had swooped over her head and her heart turned over; a car passed and she hid from it in the bushes. And all the time her thoughts had been so entirely absorbed in replaying the confused and intricately significant exchanges of the party she had left behind that now, as the two of them turned on her as she came through the door, she hardly knew where she was. She was afraid they would notice on her breath what she had been drinking: a fruit cup made deadly with pure alcohol stolen from the hospital by someone’s boyfriend who was a medic. Luckily she had walked off the worst of her intoxication, only as she adjusted to the paraffin-smelling warmth she swayed with a twinge of nausea.

Lil had put a beer set on her hair and it was pinned to her head in flat curls tied around with an old scarf.

— Vera wants to bring our Gilbert to live here.

— Who’s Gilbert?

— Our brother Gilbert.

— I thought he went away?

— He’s been ill. He needs a home to go to.

— You don’t know what he’s like, said Lil. For all you know, he may have had operations; he may be worse.

— Why did he go away in the first place?

— There was trouble. He fought with your grandfather.

— Your grandfather was a real Victorian, said Lil, with pride. He didn’t have the modern ideas about encouraging children. After Ernest went off to the war, he came down very hard on Gilbert, because he was the only one he’d got left — the only son.

When they lived in the North, Joyce had often visited the tiny terraced house where her mother and aunt and their five brothers and sisters grew up, with its curtains pulled almost across at the parlor window, even in daylight, and a hairy sofa that prickled the backs of bare legs tormentingly. A short walk away from the house down a side street, through a door locked with a key, was her grandfather’s garden, full of brilliant flowers; once he had cut a big red one to put behind her ear, and then later at tea an earwig had crawled out of it and fallen onto her frock. Vera and Lil told fearsome stories of their father, of how he was so strict that when they were children they had to stand up to eat at table, and how once he snatched a book Vera was reading and threw it into the fire. Joyce found it hard to connect these stories with the gentle old man she remembered, scrupulous to protect her frock and shoes from dirt, laying out a bit of clean sack on top of a bucket for her to sit on. His huge hard hands and flat fingers were covered with old seams and scars that were blue like ink from the coal dust that got in (he worked in a mine). Dexterously he twisted off dead flower heads, pulled out weeds, and fastened leaning stems to lengths of cane with raffia, but when he put the flower in her hair his fingers trembled with the effort, as though she were something he was afraid to touch.

He was dead now, and her grandmother lived with one of her other daughters in Hebburn and couldn’t remember things.

— They were uneducated people, said Vera. That could be forgiven them. But they had a hatred of learning. I used to creep down at night and rake up the coals to read by. Of course I pulled that book back out of the fire, but it was scorched and dirty. It was a library book: Mrs. Cruikshank’s John Halifax, Gentleman. I thought I would never be able to visit the library again, I thought that was an end of everything I cared about. But then I met the librarian in the street, and she was so kind, and I told her all of it, and she came round and talked to Mam and Dad. “You don’t know what a precious thing you’ve got here,” she said. Not that they listened.