Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

He didn’t like Peter playing the violin. Sometimes when Peter played, Gilbert would take Winnie out walking in the fields, or he would sit shaking his head as if he had an insect in his ears; he suggested that Peter should learn “something with a bit more life in it.” Peter, who was touchy about his playing, pretended he couldn’t understand anything Gilbert said. In the evenings Gilbert twiddled the knobs on the wireless to find swing and dance-band music; sometimes he couldn’t tune it properly and sat with his ear close to the wire mesh, frowning with ferocious absorption as he followed after the trailing ends of happy party music that came and went.

From time to time, letters still came for Vera. One afternoon Joyce saw one of them lying opened on her aunt’s dressing table. She took it out of its envelope and read across the top of the sheet of letter paper inside that it was from Appleton Mental Hospital. The Dr. Gurton that Vera took every opportunity to mention was deputy superintendent there. His letter was very short, thanking her for sending him the latest news of Gilbert’s progress, praising her for her enlightened views on the treatment of mental illness in the “therapeutic community.” Scrawled across the bottom of the sheet he had added, “I am sorry, but I do not know the novel by A. P. Herbert on divorce-law reform which you recommend.” Perhaps Dr. Gurton was trying to discourage Vera from sending him letters. Joyce had seen her aunt writing to him, covering sheet after sheet in her handsome spiky italic hand.

She didn’t tell the others. She thought that the mental hospital was worse than prison; she felt incensed against Vera for inflicting Gilbert on them. She began to keep out of his way as if whatever he had might be contaminating. It wasn’t Gilbert himself who disgusted her. He had shown her card tricks and blushed with pleasure when she couldn’t guess how they were done. But the idea of his connection to such an unimaginable place, full of an assembly of all the horrors she had ever had a glimpse of in the street, in tow after shamed mothers, or hobbling and gibbering by themselves: that was unbearable; she had to shut it out. Uncle Dick on one of his rare visits to the house said that Vera must be out of her mind, bringing Gilbert to stay where there were growing girls. Vera retorted that it was Dick who shouldn’t be allowed near growing girls. Joyce asked for a bolt to be fixed on the inside of the bathroom door.

She thought that Gilbert began to avoid contact with her too. This might be because she was going off to college every day; perhaps he thought she was too full of her superior self. Perhaps he was offended by the careful rituals of preparation she went through in the evenings, as if she required more complex maintenance than the rest of them: rinsing her delicates in the sink, mending her stockings, altering clothes, spreading the blanket on the kitchen table to press with a flatiron heated on the stove her outfit for the next day.

* * *

Ann and Gilbert hung about together, following after the geese and, as Lil called it, “bothering them.” Lil had raised the geese from little gray chicks; she used their eggs for baking and omelets, and they were supposed to be eaten at Christmas, although this year because of Kay no one had been able to contemplate asking Farmer Brookes to take them away and kill them. Joyce quailed at their loud gabblings and honkings and snapping beaks, but Ann was fearless with them; she loved them. They attacked any visitors with their wings open and their necks outstretched, hissing; the delivery men wouldn’t leave their vans until Lil had driven the geese off, flapping at them with her apron. Gus, Ann’s favorite, was the ringleader and the most vicious. She crooned to him, smoothing down his creamy fat neck, burying her hands under his wings, kissing his beak; he loved nothing better than to stand pressed dazedly up against her while she tickled him. Gilbert, in a kind of symmetry, made up to Flo. Gus and Flo slept together in the grass in the orchard, a plump heap the color of yellow cream, feathers as satisfactorily intricate as neat knitting. They always slept with one eye open; if two of them slept together, one watched right, one left.

Ann played with Gilbert as if he were another pet. He submitted patiently while she stroked the lines of his face with her fingers, pinched the lobes of his ears, nibbled his hands. They competed in Scissors, Paper, Stone and she always won, because she saw his fist first and changed hers in a fraction of a second. He traipsed round after her in obedience to sharp commands she snapped out in her bossy voice. She didn’t call him Uncle Gilbert as Vera said they should, just Gilly. Once she dressed him up in one of Lil’s dresses over his trousers, tied a bow of ribbon in his hair, and put lipstick and clip earrings on him. When Lil gave her a talking to, Gilbert said she didn’t mean any harm by it.

— You don’t know her, Lil said. She means it, all right.

Ann teased Gus and Flo, offering bits of grass and snatching them out of reach, ruffling their neck feathers the wrong way, picking up their patient pink feet. Flo didn’t mind, but Gus would lose his temper and then Gilbert laughed at him and held his beak closed if he tried to snap at them. Their wings were clipped, but they could fly high enough to then come skidding down along the surface of the rhines with their feet out, sending up a crest of water to either side; they seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of it. That made Gilbert laugh; he sat watching them for half an hour at a time, crouched down on his haunches with his elbows on his knees. Joyce remembered that in the North she had seen men sitting out in the street like this, the miners outside their houses and on the street corners, smoking and talking with their friends. Another thing that reminded her of those men was the way he smoked Lil’s Woodbines, nursing them down to the last nub between thumb and forefinger, behind the palm of his hand. Vera got exasperated with how he mashed up his potatoes into his gravy and drank his tea out of his saucer, and how he liked to wash stripped down to his trousers at the kitchen sink, lathering and puffing and blowing. Joyce couldn’t see how he was going to last in the South, where none of these ways fitted in with how people did things.

* * *

Lil had packed his bag to go into that place. Her mam had sent the neighbors for her when Gilbert started on his rampage in the afternoon. Not that any of them had thought he was going in for more than a few days. She hadn’t thought at the time that he was sick, just angry. Gilbert had always had a temper; when he was a baby, scarcely toddling, he used to beat his head deliberately against the floor when he was crossed; he’d even crawl off the rug to where he could beat it against the bare tiles because it hurt more. And when he and Ernest fought as boys, Gilbert often came out best even though Ernest was bigger, because Ernest was slow and gentle where Gilbert was wild. He clung on like a vicious dog; she’d seen his big boot stamping down on Ernest’s head where he had him pinned on the floor, cursing him from between his clenched teeth. This fighting used to break Mam’s heart. Gilbert was her favorite, her late last baby, beautiful with his yellow curls. She’d dressed him up when he was small in a plaid tam-o’-shanter set sideways at a jaunty angle; there was a photograph of that somewhere. Not that Gilbert was angry all the time, of course. He could be a charmer, with his quick grin. Girls loved him, all the better it seemed because he was so moody; he was always going with someone, and then the girl would call round asking where he was and Mam had to lie for him, although she’d never tell a lie for anyone but Gilbert. Ivor couldn’t get on with Gilbert. He’d said he was so sharp he’d cut himself.