Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Daphne grinned incredulously through the gates at the police station; possibly she thought Joyce was so frightened of her that she was going to take refuge with the law.

— Oh, well, she said, if you see him, tell him au revoyer from me. Tell him he’s a naughty boy, leaving my uncle in the lurch.

She cycled off under the streetlamps, making the bike dance in wide curves from one side of the road to the other, sitting back on the saddle with her hands in the pockets of her short jacket.

* * *

They found out that gilbert had hitched his way up north to see his mother; their sister Selina, whose husband played the clarinet at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, gave him some money. After that there was no news from him for years. He left the model Hurricane with half a fuselage and one wing; Martin tried to finish it but in the end had to resign himself to building a crash scene around it, using artificial grass from the greengrocer’s and making ruined buildings out of papier-mâché, decorating them with German shop signs and a Nazi flag.

Someone explained to Joyce much later — at a time when all the old methods of treating psychiatric patients were coming into disrepute and everybody was reading R. D. Laing — what the insulin treatment actually consisted of. Patients fasted for fourteen hours and then were put into a rubber sided bed, as a protection against the convulsions produced by the drug; an insulin coma was deliberately induced, and then the patient had to be revived by counteractive injections into the vein. These didn’t always work; sometimes there was an unseemly struggle round the bed, bringing the patient back to consciousness. Joyce told admiringly then the story of her aunt’s rescue; she didn’t confess how fervently at the time she had wished Gilbert back where he came from, and how sometimes even now she looked and didn’t look for him with guilty dread in the faces of the beggars and winos who passed her in the street.

Lil became convinced Gilbert had joined up and fought in Korea and died there. She said she’d seen him once at a séance; she spoke about it in the special voice she used for the transcendent: stubborn and emotionally uplifted.

— He was in uniform. He was all bloody. But he was very calm, and smiling. He came to tell us that he was finally at peace.

This voice particularly irritated Vera.

— It’s enough to make anyone despair, said Vera. How can you be comforted by something that didn’t happen? You don’t seem able to distinguish between dreams and real things.

Vera at that time was clearing out cupboards in the old house, throwing away the accumulated rubbish of their life there with ruthlessness and zeal. She and Peter were going to move into a flat near Amery-James; she was going to start divorce proceedings against Uncle Dick.

— Peace! she exclaimed. What kind of travesty is that? Peace through war. Is that the best solution you can come up with?

Ray and Iris Deare were one of the couples everyone wanted to know. They were both painters. As soon as Ray finished studying Fine Art at the college he had been invited to join the teaching staff; he taught drawing to Joyce in her second year. She was terrified of him, always imagining how impatient he must feel at having to be bothered with her flawed work. There were others in the class, talented and confident, with whom Ray carried on a dialogue she greedily listened in on and soaked up: Cézanne’s petite sensation, the difference between Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist experiments, the importance of the spaces between the shapes, the need for a pencil no harder than HB and no softer than B, Degas’s lithographs of prostitutes. The first time she heard her teacher use the word “prostitute” casually, as if it was just another fact in the world, Joyce felt something crumble in the pit of her stomach, choking and intoxicating her.

Ray hardly ever spoke to her directly, even when sometimes he reached across her shoulder to change something in her drawing, so that his tweedy rough sleeve was against her cheek for a few moments and she could smell his cold pipe in his pocket. He was untidy, shortish, with a crumpled lyrical face and brown curly hair; his wet brown eyes might have been doglike, pleading and needy, except that they were always veiled with irony and jokes.

— Miss Stevenson, he said to her once, you’re not looking. You’re only drawing what you think is there. Don’t think. You have to learn to be stupid in order to draw.

Joyce didn’t mind. She knew what he meant. She liked the invitation to be stupid. She practiced losing herself in the quiet of the life room, where the intent soft patter of pencils and charcoal was necessary and soothing as breathing. If anyone spoke, it woke her as if from a dream.

Iris Deare was training to be a primary school teacher. In the beginning it was Iris whom Joyce was in love with, at least as much as Ray. It was Iris who invited her round to visit them at their flat perched high on the first floor of one of the old steep Georgian terraces that overhung the river in Hilltop. In the sitting room — the lounge, Joyce learned to call it — there were three floor-length sash windows. Joyce had never seen anything like this room before; it was an inspiration. The floorboards were painted black, the walls were gray and hung with paintings and drawings and prints wherever there was space; nothing in the room was there because it was useful but only if it was interesting or beautiful. A huge old antique chaise longue stood along the back wall, its leather ripped and its horsehair stuffing leaking out; it was heaped with cushions, embroidered oriental ones and homemade ones covered in Liberty fabrics or batik prints Iris had done herself. In one corner of the room stood an old rocking horse with its paint washed off and its mane and tail worn down to stubble: Iris had found it put out with the rubbish in the street.

— Poor old love, she said crooningly, rubbing the horse’s stubble with her cheek, kissing his flaring nostrils that had once been brilliant red, we think he’s a magnificent charger still, don’t we?

One end of the long room, beyond a sagging screen of carved oriental wood, was given over to be Ray’s studio. The flat always smelled of paint and turps. There were no curtains at any of the windows: Joyce couldn’t imagine how that felt, never being able to close yourself off from being seen.

— Why would you want to shut that out? Iris asked reasonably, gesturing to the view of pale tiered wedding-cake terraces, steeply dropping woods, the twisting ribbon of the river, the cranes of the city docks (neglected because most of the traffic had gone to the port at the river’s mouth where Joyce’s uncle worked). Beyond the river, spreading to the hills in the distance, the flat plain was built up with Victorian terraces, warehouses, and the sprawling tobacco factory. It was scarred with ruined churches and waste plots where the bombs had fallen.

Iris made coffee in a little metal pot that sat on the gas ring, real coffee, which Joyce had only ever tasted in France. It was bitter and thick, not like she remembered it, but she swallowed it down as best she could, eagerly, like an initiation.

— Look, Ray, said Iris, isn’t she just one of those Epstein bronze heads?

Ray was stretched out on the chaise longue reading the newspaper with his shoes off, bright yellow socks showing a hole. Iris swept Joyce’s hair up and held it in a twisted knot on top of her head; she took Joyce’s chin in her fingers and pushed her face round to present her profile. Iris’s hands were very fine-boned, like all of her; she was dark and tiny with a miniature perfection Joyce yearned for: creamy pale skin, high cheekbones, slanting interrogative eyebrows, a tense high rib cage, a long swinging rope of dark hair down her back. She smelled of the unusual French soap she used, made with honey and almonds; her nails were perfectly shaped and painted a dark crimson like her lipstick. Her slender fingers were weighted down with huge exotic rings she’d found for next to nothing in junk shops. Joyce knew she would have passed over these rings if she’d been looking, thinking they were brash and cheap, not seeing how clever and striking they could be if you knew how to carry them off.