Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce knew Daphne. She had never spoken to her, but she had seen her, before she even knew she was Mrs. Brookes’s niece. One hot summer’s afternoon a couple of years before, she and Ann had decided not to wait at the Seamen’s Mission for their uncle but to walk the two miles home instead. The road ran past the smelting works; the workers must have been on a break, and because it was so hot they were out in the yard, the men in their vests, the girls barelegged, smoking and bantering. Joyce and Ann had put their school hats in their satchels and carried their blazers over their arms, but nonetheless they must have looked unmistakably like the nicely brought-up schoolgirls they were; they toiled past in an agony of conspicuousness, their faces set in masks of indifference to the remarks and jokes that flew after them hard as stones, about French lessons and hot stockings and getting their uniforms dirty in the grass. Daphne was the loudest of the girls in the yard, and the one who broke into the Carmen Miranda impression (“I–I-I–I-I–I-I–I like you ve-ry much”), at the top of her voice, swinging her hips and waving her arms over her head, showing the sprouting thick dark hair under her arms, making everyone laugh at her. She was only about Joyce’s age, but she was tall and big-busted, with a curved red-lipsticked mouth and a luxuriant black perm. Her eyes were small and darting: black, with a slight cast in one of them.

After that, although she avoided walking past the smelting works ever again, Joyce seemed to see Daphne often, around in Farmouth and sometimes on the road up to the farm. And always Daphne seemed to look at her with dangerous, intimate mockery, although they never spoke. The whole gist of the teasing and the danger was that it was exposing and humiliating to be still at school, and superior to be adult and free and working. Yet complicatedly what Joyce felt with a plunge of guilt whenever she saw Daphne was that there was no good reason why she should be still at school, and then at college, and why Daphne should have to be exposed to what Joyce imagined was the horror of the smelting works.

Gilbert borrowed an old bike from the farm, and every evening that Daphne didn’t appear he rode down to Farmouth to be near her. Sometimes she visited the house with some message for Gilbert from her uncle. It wasn’t clear whether she encouraged him or not. If ever anyone saw them together, Daphne would be in the lead, swaying her hips to some dance tune inside her head, and Gilbert would be traipsing after, neck bent, eyes down. She called him Geordie and laughed at the way he spoke. Vera followed the affair with great anxiety and warned Gilbert to be careful; he shook his head as if her words were a distracting buzzing.

Martin and Peter hated Daphne and were terrified of her. She called them little boys and told them how the farmers had to cut off the lambs’ “little winkies” to make them behave. They reacted to her violently, frenziedly; if she touched them they scrubbed the place with soap, and they said she smelled. She did wear a lot of scent — Chypre de Coty, which Gilbert replaced for her out of his wages from Farmer Brookes — and it was true too that if she’d cycled up from Farmouth she would be sweating, with big wet patches showing on her blouse under her arms, her face red, drops of sweat trickling down the sides of her nose. Joyce would have been humiliated and appalled at herself in that condition, but Daphne seemed to relish it, wiping her face with the back of her hand, blowing and gasping comically while she got her breath.

— Hot ride? Joyce said.

— Bloody hot, said Daphne. Want to feel?

And she pulled her sopping shirt away from her wet back as if Joyce seriously might.

Daphne didn’t exactly make conversation; she kept up a stream of jokes and sayings and teasings. When she made a burping noise she said, “Pardon me for being rude; it was not me, it was my food”; she told Peter to stop gawping or the wind would change and he’d be stuck like that; she said, “Every little helps, said the lady as she piddled in the sea,” and, when she leaned across someone, “Scuse me reaching, I’ve just got off the boat.”

When Martin and Peter disappeared sometimes in the evenings, Joyce suspected they were haunting the dunes behind the beach in hope and dread of finding Gilbert and Daphne there together.

— She’s foul, Mum, said Peter. You should tell Uncle Gilbert he’s not allowed to bring her in the house.

— He’s a perfect right to make friends with whoever he likes, Vera said sorrowfully.

* * *

Influenced by Mr. Scofield, his violin teacher, Peter had started listening to classical music. They had a gramophone in the front room that Dick had bought secondhand for Vera in the North: a tall wooden cabinet with a lid that propped open at the top, doors at the front, a wind-up handle on the side. The needles were made of bone and had to be sharpened on a piece of emery paper; new ones were kept in a tiny tin with the His Master’s Voice dog on the front. Peter sorted through the records in their brown card sleeves, mastering the names of the composers, sampling and replacing them, quickly expert in the rituals of placing the record, checking it for dust, lowering the arm. Vera found him adjusting the speed because the turntable was too slow and played everything slightly out of tune. She would never have noticed. She gave way to her son with a new respect and sat mutely while he explained to her.

— Listen to this, Ma, this is a jolly bit. Then it gets all tragic and moody. Especially listen to the horns. Only they ought to be brighter. The Philharmonic do it better; you should hear the recording old Scoffer’s got, it’s splendid.

The front room smelled of damp. The flags were laid directly on the earth, and they hardly ever lit a fire in there except at Christmas. It was overcrowded with big pieces of furniture, chairs and sideboards and occasional tables that no one had tried to arrange properly. Vera’s things were heavy carved oak; she and Dick had bought them along with their first house in Gateshead. Lil’s were cheap utility. They were doubled up in readiness for when their lives might separate again.

Peter was as tall as Vera was now. He started to advise her on her dress, as well as on her reading and her opinions. Her blue scarf was a ghastly clash with her green blouse, and if she didn’t replace her horrible old handbag he wouldn’t be seen out with her. She ought to read Dylan Thomas and George Barker, not stuffy old Masefield and de la Mare. Vera was surprisingly compliant, almost girlish in her willingness to relinquish her command to this authoritative son. She looked at him in quizzical pleased surprise, as though she did not quite know where he had sprung from.

* * *

Gilbert said he was going to Marry Daphne, but no one knew whether he had really asked her. Ann pestered him over it: Was it going to be in church? What would Daphne wear? Had he bought her a ring? Would there be bridesmaids?

— And if you have children, what are you going to call them?

— Now that’s enough, said Lil sternly. Stop that teasing.

— It’s not teasing, Ann said, opening her eyes wide. Isn’t it real? Why can’t I ask him?

One summer afternoon Joyce was packing in her bedroom; she was going to spend a week in Paris with friends from the Art College. Dresses and blouses and underclothes, carefully mended and pressed, were laid out on the bed beside the open suitcase. She had sewed herself a new gray Liberty print dress with a full skirt and a white patent-leather belt; to earn the money for this and for the trip she had been working since the college term ended for a friend of Uncle Dick’s in a marine insurance office in the city. Swallows were swooping dizzily in the big empty blue bowl of sky outside; the wood pigeons were heating up their end-of-tether crooning; the weather was languid and dreamy. Then Gilbert was suddenly in the yard, home from the Brookeses before he should have been, in a flurry of noise and banging.