Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Something had had to be done, that afternoon. He had thrown furniture down the stairs and fired his air gun out of the window, although the window had been open and he hadn’t hit anything. They couldn’t even remember afterward what the quarrel had been about. It would have been about nothing. It would have been their dad pulling Gilbert up as usual for some little thing, picking up a comb that wasn’t his and putting it in his pocket, or making some disrespectful joke about their grandmother, or even just pushing past Dad in a hurry on the stairs. You could see what it was that made Dad pick on Gilbert. Gilbert went about life in those days with an air as if he knew better than his elders. He didn’t want to work in the mine like his dad and his brother (not that Ernest could get work anyway, before the war). Gilbert was training as an electrician. He said, “Dad, I’ll be earning in a week what you earn in a month.”

Lil remembered packing up his shirts and washcloth and a razor (which of course they’d taken off him), laying it all out with his pen and some writing paper in the little suitcase like you would for a trip to the seaside. She did not see how he would ever be able to forgive her for this. She hadn’t been in her right mind, that winter after Ivor was killed, although she knew she had seemed all right: she hadn’t made a fuss, she’d got on with everyday life. But it should have been her they locked up and gave insulin treatment to, for being mad enough to calmly lay out her brother’s things for him to go to that place. Now she couldn’t look him in the eye.

* * *

It distressed Vera that Gilbert spent so much time asleep. He didn’t get up until late; then often during the day when they looked for him they’d find he’d slipped back into his room and into bed again. She tried to get him to take an interest in things. She got down poetry books from her shelves and read to him, and in the evenings she read from her complete set of Dickens (“my beloved Dickens” she called him). She suggested that they should go out walking and she could teach him to identify the flora and fauna of the area. She brought up topical subjects to discuss with him, collectivization in the Soviet Union, vegetarianism, the atom bomb. Gilbert wrote a beautiful painstaking round copperplate hand (they knew this from the crosswords he did, or when he kept the score at cards), but he didn’t show any interest in the diary Vera encouraged him to keep. She worried about what she called to Lil his “physical needs.” Sometimes unself-consciously he scratched or rubbed his groin, and she quickly knocked his hand away.

— He needs to be doing some hard physical work, she said to Lil. To tire himself out. Perhaps I’ll ask at the farm if they need anyone.

Gilbert began to work for Farmer Brookes. It was a muddy old farm with a dozen cows and small fields growing mangolds and hay and millet. The farmer ran it with his wife; their son worked on the docks. Gilbert helped with the milking — which was still done by hand — and put the churns out on their platform to be picked up by the lorry from the Milk Marketing Board; he fetched the cows home from the fields in the afternoons, and in June he helped with the hay harvest.

— It’s what he needs, said Vera. Outdoor physical work, wholesome and timeless, close to nature, not intellectually demanding.

Gilbert wasn’t terribly reliable. Sometimes he got up late, or wandered home early, or forgot to finish some dirty job. Luckily the farm was run on haphazard lines, and the easygoing old farmer seemed to adapt to Gilbert’s arbitrary comings and goings. Anyway, he was only paying Gilbert a few shillings.

— Don’t you think he’s happy here? Vera wondered in the kitchen, bent over the dirty saucepan she was scrubbing, burdened with worry, shedding hairpins into the dishwater. Don’t you think we did right?

— Search me, said Lil, with a closed face, cleaning eggs at the table with a wet rag.

— With his family round him instead of strangers, Vera went on. Free to come and go as he wants, working out in the fresh air, taking a new interest in life. Dr. Gurton thinks it must be doing him a world of good.

* * *

Lil had only been to visit Gilbert in the hospital once. The idea of this scalded her now, in his presence. How must he account for this? What must he think of her? She had pretended to herself that because he was ill he would not notice whether she went or not, but she was sure now that she had always known this was not true. When Gilbert was born she had just started in service; she came home on her days off and lavished all her love on him, imagining he was a baby of her own, dressing him up in his pretty white dresses, and wheeling him proudly round the streets in the old pram. For her wedding he had been a page boy in a velvet jacket, and he had sung out all by himself with “There is a green hill far away” at the moment she and Ivor were exchanging their vows (she was delighted, but Ivor was put off and muddled his responses).

She had not gone to visit Gilbert in that place again because the one time she saw him there it had been a horror; she had been visited in her dreams afterward by the little twisted man with a brown wizened face and cleft palate who had come in the room while they were waiting for Gilbert to be brought out; he had asked her for cigarettes and sworn at her when she didn’t respond to him because she didn’t understand. Everything she was afraid of in those days she had simply shut out from her thoughts. She had known they were giving Gilbert something to keep him in a stupor, because she could smell it everywhere (Mam thought that the stupor was his illness). He hadn’t said much; he told them he had asked to work in the hospital laundry because you could give yourself a decent shave there at your own pace, and he complained that the pillows were stuffed with straw and they were put to bed at seven-thirty. His voice was slurred as if his tongue were thick, and he had a bruise on his temple. When they got up to go he asked when he could come home with them, and Mam had said, Soon, as soon as he was better.

— I don’t want to miss everything, he said. I know I’ve got some catching up to do.

Mam went up there every week. Even Vera had gone more often than Lil had, though she had never been much interested in Gilbert when he was born. It was Vera who told Lil that the patients weren’t allowed knives, so they had to eat everything with a spoon. But Vera had been off in her own dreams, at that time when Gilbert was put away. With Dick gone in the navy and Peter at school, she had volunteered to work at a book collection point in a church hall where people brought their old books to be pulped and made into paper for the war effort. She said she was sorting and bundling up the books, but she was mostly feverishly reading them. She went home with armfuls more to read before she brought them back again the following week. She sometimes hardly knew who she was when you spoke to her.

Lil had said to her mother that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert. But her mother lived in fear of the doctors and wouldn’t argue with them or make any trouble when they asked her to sign papers. They said he had delusions, and that he was a danger to himself and others. And Lil allowed herself, so long as she didn’t actually have to see him, to pretend to believe all this. She was kept busy anyway thinking about other things: the children and the house and trying to take in a bit of sewing to eke out her war widow’s pension. But she knew all the time he must be wondering why his favorite sister didn’t come.

* * *

Gilbert got lovesick over a girl: Daphne, a niece of farmer Brookes’s wife. She had a job in the smelting works, but she used to cycle up from where she lived in Farmouth and visit her aunt on summer evenings.