Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Several of Aunt Vera’s stories featured women like this, enlightened and resilient and independent, intervening on her behalf with the forces of ignorance and superstition. As well as the librarian, there was the teacher at grammar school who’d helped her get into college and an older friend at the Girl Guides who’d started her off on her botany and her interest in old churches.

— Uncle Gilbert won’t want to come here, will he? Joyce asked. Hasn’t he got a home of his own?

Lil looked a heavy warning at her sister.

— I’ve changed, Joyce, said Vera dramatically. I can’t just sit back and watch all the iniquity of the world and not do anything about it.

Joyce shrugged.

— Just so long as it doesn’t mean I have to share my room with Ann.

— Vera should learn to let well alone, said Lil with foreboding.

It occurred to Joyce that Gilbert might have been in prison. The idea alarmed her; but she didn’t want to ask them directly. There was something that made Joyce queasy in the conspiratorial way the two sisters sat brooding over things together at the kitchen table, even when they were quarreling. Their talk was as dark and thick and sticky as the malt and cod-liver oil the children were dosed with to keep off colds. She didn’t want to give them the opportunity to hush up and exchange scalding glances and shut her out. She concentrated on her plans to get away and live a new young person’s life with her friends in town.

* * *

Mysterious letters arrived at the house. Aunt Vera snatched them up and read them when she came in after school, not even waiting to take off her hat and gloves. Lil wrung her tea towel into a wet knot, in anxious resistance. Then in the Easter holidays Vera drove off in the Austin Seven and was gone three days without any explanation. Joyce was drawing in the apple room when she heard the car whining in the lane and looked out of the window to see it nose onto the cobbles in front of the house, Aunt Vera sitting upright and tense in the passenger seat and at the wheel a boy with a long pale face and a tall shock of hair that looked fair through the windscreen glass. In fact, when he stepped out of the car she saw that he was a man, not a boy, and that his hair was silvery, like straw left to leach its color out in the rain. Aunt Vera climbed shakily from her side, and Joyce knew from the stoop of her shoulders and her brave lopsided smile, as she threw her hand in a gesture of welcome around at the house and the outbuildings, that she was already full of doubt at what she had done, bringing her brother home (in spite of herself, Vera could never smother how her posture and movements exposed the truth of her feelings).

Joyce could not think why Gilbert had come. He was tall and thin, and although he didn’t have a young face he seemed awkward like a teenager, with extravagantly long limbs and ears and nose reddened as if they had stuck out too far into a rough wind. He stood lost in the slight drizzle in the yard and showed no sign of feeling rescued. Vera had to take him by an elbow and coax him inside. The sleeves of his suit were too short above his bony wrists.

— Lillie’s here, Lil’s here, she said. Come in and see Lillie.

He submitted to her.

They were all introduced to him in the crowded kitchen (Peter came from his violin practice, Martin from where he was building a rocket in an outhouse). Gilbert’s shirt collar was yellowed and tight over his Adam’s apple; his big shoes were cracked and hard and mottled with white as if they had been put away too long in a cupboard; his deep-set blue eyes were glancing and evasive. He put his arms around Lil, who turned to him from where she had lifted a panful of her special doughnuts out of the stove with a blank reluctant face; she patted his bent back as if she were soothing a child.

— Hallo, Gil, she said warily. After all this time.

At the kitchen table he ate one doughnut after another, while they were still too hot for the others to touch.

— Did you fight in the war? Martin asked him.

— I did not, he said, licking sugar from his fingers intently. I wanted to, but they wouldn’t allow it.

The children couldn’t always understand him; he mumbled to himself, and his Tyneside accent was broad.

— Gilbert was in hospital, Vera explained busily. He’s been ill a long time, but he’s better now. And a good thing too, that he wasn’t sent to the slaughter. This family gave enough of their young men.

— Our brother Ernest was killed, said Gilbert. And Ivor, your father.

— He remembers! said Lil, as if he’d accomplished something.

— Well, of course he remembers.

They gave him Kay’s room for his own. Lil had dismantled the cot while Vera was away.

— Shouldn’t there be another child? asked Gilbert. A little girl?

For an uncomfortable moment they all thought he meant Kay.

— Oh, Ann’s at a friend’s house! Joyce suddenly understood. She’ll be back for tea.

He nodded.

— I was sure there was two of you.

— Did they cut him? Has he had any operation? Joyce overheard Lil hiss to Vera under cover of a clatter of pans.

— He has not. The doctor said he had an insulin treatment. I can’t speak highly enough of Dr. Gurton. He’s a very dedicated and humane man. He spoke of great changes to come, with new pharmaceutical developments in the field.

— Gilbert doesn’t seem too bad, said Lil cautiously.

* * *

He wasn’t a nuisance around the place. He mostly sat in his room at first, or at the kitchen table, spelling stubbornly through an old newspaper, or he threw sticks for Winnie the bulldog in the field beyond the house. They were all obscurely weighed down with anxiety for him, however, and relieved if ever he showed signs of being happy with them. A one-sided grin slipped on his face occasionally, like the quick flare of an unexpected light. Something in his movements was not quite right for a man of almost thirty; he was too quick and loose and absorbed in himself; he hadn’t assumed the containment and responsive gravity of a grown-up. Martin imitated his slow shuffling walk and his accent; Gilbert didn’t seem to mind. He listened respectfully while Martin explained his latest science project. (This had to do with the parable about the man who was paid in grains of rice on a chessboard, doubling for each square. Martin and his friend were calculating how many grains there would actually be by the sixty-fourth square, and how many it took to make up a square inch, and whether the rice would really cover India a foot deep.)

In his suitcase Gilbert had brought a little case of bits of stuff for making flies for fishing, and for a while he and Martin drew close together, fiddling with pliers and cobbler’s wax, tying fantastically intricate creations out of brightly dyed feathers and bits of tinsel and squirrel hair. He showed Martin how to wet his fingers and run them down the feathers so that the fibers separated and stood out at right angles to the quill. But Gilbert didn’t have the patience for the fishing itself; much to Martin’s indignation he wandered off and came home after an hour or so, leaving Martin to pack away the rods. “He’s got no sticking power,” Martin complained. Neither of them really knew how to fly-fish anyway; it seemed Gilbert had only been taught how to make the flies, not use them. The other thing Gilbert could do impressed Martin more. When he found that Martin had a welding torch and a clamp (they had been Ivor’s), he asked for everyone’s spare pennies and halfpennies, and in one of the outhouses he began welding together a model airplane out of the coins, a Hurricane. He had a picture to work from, torn out of a magazine. The model was a complex and beautiful thing: quite large, about eighteen inches from end to end of the fuselage. The coins were welded together like miniature riveted plates, then burnished coppery pink. Martin learned how to heat the coins and shape them, but he could never make them curve with Gilbert’s precision. Gilbert even made a little pilot, with a tiny helmet, and tiny hands on the controls, and a tiny coppery face with a mustache. He said he had learned to do this in hospital. His life seemed to be made up of hobbies and not of real man’s work, as if he were stuck in boyhood.