Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— The men look down on it, she said, but they don’t understand: clothes are an art form in themselves. Just because they’re stuck with wearing their boring frowsty trousers and jackets and things, they don’t appreciate just how much real creative work we women have to put into what we wear.

— You seem to manage to do that and be a painter too.

Iris made a rueful face, waggling her cigarette in the corner of her mouth while she talked, squinting her eyes against the smoke, cleverly folding a tiny paper ruff with her tapering hands.

— Oh, my poor old painting. At the moment, it seems to be getting precisely nowhere. I’m so busy preparing classes for my children, learning horrid arithmetic to torture them with, trying to write my essay on Piaget.

She and Joyce were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Hilltop flat, making hand puppets for a play Iris was putting on at the teacher training college. The heads were made of papier-mâché, the hands and feet of chamois leather; there was a King with a fierce red face and a pretty pink Queen. Joyce was helping to cut out the clothes. Ray was in college. They were drinking black coffee as usual. Joyce wondered about Iris’s housekeeping: there never seemed to be proper food in the flat. She never saw Iris eat anything, although sometimes there were strange things in the kitchen cupboard, bought from the expensive delicatessen round the corner: French meat pastes and Scandinavian salted fish and pots of sour yogurt. Joyce didn’t like to mention that she was hungry; in Iris’s company such an admission seemed demeaning.

— Can you imagine, said Iris, suddenly putting the King puppet down in her lap, what it’s like trying to think of yourself as a painter when you’re married to someone like Ray?

Joyce looked at her with earnest sympathy.

— I do see what you mean, she said, though I love your beautiful still lifes.

Iris shrugged.

— I worked so hard, she said. All the years I was at the art college I devoted myself to them, thinking that if I just persisted then they must eventually come right.

Joyce spoke carefully.

— Just because Ray’s work is so special, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for yours. It’s a different kind of thing.

— It’s worse than that. His paintings make me feel that my paintings are a lie. I thought they were authentic, but they weren’t the real thing. I was always looking through somebody else’s eyes. Perhaps I’ve never seen anything, really. Not like when Ray sees something.

Joyce looked at Iris in dismay. She could see this was a discovery it would be difficult to endure. She was thankful that she had not chosen Fine Arts.

— I’m not even sure how much I want to carry on with my own work. I think actually it’s more fulfilling, more truthful, for me to put myself in service of what Ray’s doing. That’s why I’m training as a teacher, really. I needed to have something practical to get on with, and then it means I can support us both, if he doesn’t sell enough work or if he gets tired of working at the college and just wants to paint.

Joyce did not question Iris’s estimate of the value of her own work. When she looked at one of her small still lifes again — red cherries heaped up on a plate, painted in fine careful brushstrokes against a dark background, one she had particularly loved — she thought perhaps she could see what Iris meant. Compared to one of Ray’s paintings, it seemed, yes, closed and bounded by convention. This corresponded, too, to some limitation she intuited in Iris. Although she so admired Iris’s distinctive stylishness, there was also something stolid and unvarying in her. Joyce thought this stolidity irritated Ray, and Iris didn’t know it. Things he casually and spontaneously said, Iris took over and translated into fixed superior positions. She thought he winced, sometimes, when his exaggerations came back to him as earnest doctrine.

Iris’s problem was that she wasn’t funny. In the crowd this was the one unforgivable lapse. Everything was funny, if only you were brave enough to see it. Their best times were when they were disorderly together, helpless with laughter, causing trouble and drawing disapproving looks, the girls complaining they were going to wet themselves. They told stories about the everyday things that happened to them that changed the ordinary grayness into a crazed colorful circus. An old man wearing all his war medals and no shirt saluted Dud Mason in the street every morning. Once while they were drawing Yoyo put on a lady’s hat and brought some steps and looked down at them from one of the high screens placed behind the model, as though he were nine feet tall. An organist broke wind in church in time to the music he was playing, and a choirboy fainted from suppressed laughter. A balloon bursting at Christmas blew off the paper hat of a dignified relative. Their parents’ hard-fought-for respectability — all that lifetime’s weight of effort over curtains and sideboards and putting milk in a jug and having a little stand to hold the cake plates and cleaning out your ears — exploded in a conflagration of mockery.

Joyce began to tell stories — tentatively at first, in case these things weren’t actually funny but humiliating — about her mother and her aunt and her uncle with his other woman. She told them about Gilbert, and how Vera tried to enlighten him through poetry. Ray laughed. He told them about the time when he had to run a gauntlet of catcalling women when his father took him into the garment-making rooms at a Co-op manufactory to be fitted for his school shorts. She was glad he didn’t mind being funny at his own expense. This was another rule: you were unforgivable if you took yourself too seriously (apart from your art, of course, which you couldn’t take seriously enough).

Joyce didn’t think Iris had irony. She had a suspicion that Iris never let up on the high seriousness with which she took things.

* * *

They all went to a fancy dress ball at the teacher training college. As art students they had to outdo the staid and much more conforming student teachers. Joyce made herself a tight-fitting black cat suit with a long tail that she carried draped over her arm; she drew whiskers on her cheeks and blacked the end of her nose and sewed pink satin pads onto black gloves for paws. She pinned up her hair under a black cap onto which she had stitched pointed ears. Yoyo came as Harpo Marx; Lenny Barnes was a playing card. Ray and Iris came as an Indian raja and rani; they had their faces stained brown and he wore a silky paisley turban and a mustache.

— Meow, Miss Stevenson, he said, when they met up outside the training college.

— Meow, Your Worshipfulness, she replied (she couldn’t quite think how one ought to address a raja). In her cat costume she felt licensed to be different from her usual circumspect self. She rubbed his nose with her black one, leaving a smudge, then did the same to Iris. Iris was poised and lovely in a full-length sari, a red Hindu wedding spot painted between her eyes, her long plait hanging down her back with a flower braided into the end. She tickled Joyce behind her cat ears.

The hall at the training college was new, all lined in blond wood with a pale parquet floor (the girls wearing stilettos had to take them off and dance in their stockings). They drank beer out of paper cups and danced to the trad band and then because it was Lenny’s birthday someone opened champagne and they drank some of that too. One wall was glass from floor to ceiling; there were long bright African print curtains but these had been left open, and outside as it got dark there came a huge brooding yellow moon, hanging close to the earth, glowing through the silhouettes of the trees.

— The moon! The moon! called Joyce, caterwauling at the window.