Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce looked out from her window; Lil and Ann ran from the kitchen to see what the matter was. Gilbert picked up the tin bucket from where it stood outside the back door and sent it hurtling across the yard. Lil had washed the kitchen floor and the bucket was full of dirty water, which sluiced out in an interesting arc, sending the hens squawking and flattening themselves close to the ground in panic. The bucket bounced off a wall and along the cobbles with a jubilant clanging. Lil and Ann screamed. Gilbert kicked at the hens, and then he picked up the outhouse shovel and hurled that after the bucket.

— Gilly, don’t! cried Ann.

— Stop it, stop that! said Lil, running after him and trying to hold on to him.

He reached around for something else to throw, found the bike he’d just ridden back on, and picked it up in his hands as if it were a toy.

— Whatever’s the matter? Put that down and stop misbehaving. You’ll hurt somebody.

Gilbert didn’t say a word. He lifted the heavy old bike right up above his head and flung it down flat so that it jarred and leaped and skidded on its side across to where Ann dodged quickly back inside the kitchen. The bike lamp crunched and sprinkled glass like sugar; the front wheel buckled. Gilbert shook off Lil and picked up a rusted old rake, which he thrust deliberately through a window with an explosive tinkling; it was only a small filthy old cobwebbed pane in the outhouse where they kept the chicken feed and paraffin. Then, with the rake, Gilbert strode off down the side of the house.

Lil burst into tears and held her apron over her face.

Vera had been making notes from a new book on Victorian social reform at a table in the front room. Now she came blinking into the aftershock of the scene.

— Goodness me, she said, whatever was all that about?

— You see, said Lil, shaking her head behind her apron, he isn’t all right.

— What did he say?

— He didn’t say anything. He’s gone down to the rhine.

Vera took in the damage: it didn’t look much with Gilbert gone, just the bike sprawled down and the yard untidy.

— Well, this is too silly, she said. I suppose I’d better go after him and ask him what’s going on, if nobody else will.

She pushed her hair behind her ears and set off down the path with an impatient schoolmistress’s forbearing frown and authoritative step.

— He’s got the rake! shouted Lil.

— Oh, has he indeed! Vera retorted, undeterred.

Joyce joined the others downstairs, and they waited in the yard for Vera to come back.

— Will he try to drown himself? Lil said suddenly.

Ann and Joyce looked at her in dismay; although the rhines were so dry in the summer months that drowning would have taken some ingenuity.

There was a sudden fracas of agitated honking from the geese down at the rhine. Then they saw Vera: running and leaping up the path in her stocking feet, her shoes kicked off somewhere, her hair flying and her mouth open, yelling to them to get inside. They bundled in and she flew into the house after them, gasping for breath, and slammed and bolted the door, leaning back against it with her chest heaving and her hair drooping out of its pins. She and Lil stared wide-eyed at each other.

— Did he say anything?

Vera shook her head.

— Did he go for you?

She nodded.

— Hell’s bells.

For the rest of the afternoon they stayed bolted in the house in a state of siege, with someone on lookout at the upstairs window for when the boys came back from fishing. Lil thought they should phone Dick, but Vera said to wait and see how Gilbert was when he calmed down. They waited for him to turn up at the house, with or without his rake. By nighttime he still hadn’t come; they went to bed with the back door bolted but left the outhouses open so he would have somewhere warm to sleep.

* * *

In the morning Ann said that Gus was acting funny. Vera went out to see if Gilbert was anywhere around; she even went down to the rhine and back, treading carefully in her slippers in the dew, looking for her shoes beside the path.

— Gone, she said, he’s gone.

The sisters looked at each other in consternation.

— What will he do? said Lil.

— What shall I tell Dr. Gurton? Vera wailed.

They stuffed her shoes with newspaper and put them to dry, while they used the telephone to call the hospital, long distance.

— Look at Gus, said Ann. There’s something wrong with him.

The geese were in the yard, wanting to be fed. Gus stood apart from the others, his wings half open and dragging, his eyes filmed over. He wouldn’t let any of them come near him — he flapped and struggled if they tried — but they could see his neck was twisted, with an ugly lump in it, and he couldn’t hold up his head. Vera sent Martin to call Farmer Brookes, who came round to have a look.

— How’s he gone and done that? the farmer said.

— We don’t know, said Vera and Lil together.

— We just found him like that, when we got up this morning, Lil added.

The farmer persuaded Gus that he meant well, and Gus let him probe gently with his fingers into the creamy neck.

— Looks like it’s broken, I’m afraid, poor old chappie. Got caught, maybe, in a bit of wire or something; although he’s not cut himself. Got any apples left to make sauce? Might as well put him out of his misery, Mrs. Stevenson. Want me to see to it?

Farmer Brookes carried Gus off through the orchard in the morning sunshine, holding him around the middle; Gus opened his wings so that it looked as though the farmer as he walked was wrestling with an angel. Ann wouldn’t watch him go; she sank down on the doorstep with her head buried in her arms in grief. They told the Brookeses to eat the goose themselves.

* * *

When joyce came back from paris, she caught the last bus out of the city to the docks; she had arranged to telephone from the Docks Police Station for Vera to come and pick her up in the car. The bus was crowded. A horrible old sailor with gray stubbly cheeks and breath that reeked of drink fell asleep beside her, and his head rolled onto her shoulder so many times that she gave up trying to push him off. She concentrated all her efforts on keeping Paris intact inside her — coffee and bread and Dior and wine and a little restaurant with red-checked tablecloths on the Boul’ Mich — so as not to lose one precious drop in collision with the ugly things of home. She had felt instantly, intimately, that she belonged to Paris; miraculously, she had seemed to understand what the Parisians said to her, far beyond the reach of her schoolgirl French. When the bus stopped and all the passengers shuffled up to get off, she realized with a shock that Daphne had been sitting all the time only a couple of seats behind her. Joyce had to pull down her heavy suitcase from the rack; she was hotly aware of the other girl watching her struggle, but they didn’t smile or even look at each other.

As Joyce carried her suitcase the fifty yards in the dark to the dock gates, Daphne came up swiftly behind her on her bike, which she must have left locked up somewhere near the bus stop. Joyce heard the whirring of her wheels and smelled Chypre de Coty.

— Bong-jooer. Had a nice time in old gay Paree?

— Yes, thank you, said Joyce.

Daphne was wobbling on the bike, weaving the handlebars to keep pace with Joyce’s walking.

— Where’s Gilbert? she asked.

— I don’t know. He went away, I think.

Daphne described a wide arc, then came alongside Joyce again.

— One sandwich short of a picnic, if you ask me. Something funny about him.

Joyce changed hands on her suitcase.

— Don’t you think?

— I’m afraid I have to go in here, said Joyce, to use the telephone.