Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— My cold friend, said Iris, pressing her face and hands against the glass, come to watch but won’t come in. Hello, old friend! Are you lonely tonight?

Ray got out his pipe and smoked it, in spite of his turban. He even kept it in his mouth while he danced. Someone said he looked like Sherlock Holmes in disguise as a Lascar.

— A Lascar! said Lenny. Oh, I want to be a Lascar. What’s a Lascar?

Ray danced strenuously, hopping about and jerking his head from side to side, not perfectly in rhythm. He didn’t like trad jazz, he preferred contemporary. Joyce was shocked at his jogging about so willingly in his turban, his eyes shining weirdly against the dark skin. She might have been disappointed that he hadn’t remained loftily apart, but instead she felt a secret exhilaration, like an inward disrespectful joke, at being unbound from some of her awe of him. Even when he and Pete Smith were ranting about Munnings and the Royal Academy, she had to swallow an exultant laughter at his mouth saying such serious things under his ridiculously waggling false mustache.

At the end of the evening, the Deares invited everyone back to their flat for coffee. Iris had already said that Joyce could stay in the spare room. When they got outside — the moon was higher in the sky and farther off by this time, silvery cool — Joyce knew she was drunk, with the wonderful kind of drunkenness where you progress along like a dodgem car by bumping into things and people and spinning forward, but there is never any chance of hurting anybody or falling over. She took to tickling the others on their necks with the end of her tail. This seemed a perfect satisfying expression of her tenderness for them all; eventually Dud Mason caught hold of her by the tail and pulled it off and wouldn’t give it back to her although she meowed piteously for it. (Dud was in a toga.) It was fun to be awake and alive and noisy in wet warm Hilltop, in all the rich green exhalations of the gardens, while behind the windows of the tall houses all the stuffy people lay sleeping. There had been a shower of rain while they were at the ball, and the roads and garden walls shone wet in the streetlights.

When they got into the flat, Dud said he was so hungry he could eat the rocking horse — he began, indeed, to gnaw on it — and then suddenly everyone was starving, and Iris and Joyce were making toast and frying eggs in the kitchen: extraordinary eggs, which no sooner broke and were in the pan than they were cooked, so that even while they were dishing them up and handing them out (Joyce still with her cat gloves on) the girls were calling everyone to come and look at the extraordinary miraculous eggs that cooked in an instant. The eggs, taken into the lounge and eaten with salt and dry toast, seemed delicious.

— Your friend’s out there again, said Joyce. She meant the moon; it was pressed onto the night outside the long lounge window like a bright sixpence.

Iris was startled and stared fearfully, as if she expected to see someone standing brooding on the balcony in the dark. After that she subsided into herself and sat wrapped tightly in her sari on the floor, the skin of her face marked purple with tiredness under the eyes and around the fine nostrils. Ray brought out a bottle of whisky. Joyce drank some out of the bathroom tooth mug that was the best he could do for a whisky glass (the others had eggcups and plastic picnic beakers). She had rubbed off her black nose and whiskers with Iris’s cold cream, and then washed her face in the bleak bathroom down half a flight of stairs, which the Deares shared with other tenants. Now she sat with her knees tucked under her among the cushions on the chaise longue and felt the men in the room orbit deliciously around her. Dud Mason, who was older and a third-year and so melancholy-funny, had coiled her cat tail up as a pillow under his cheek. He needed consoling for his poor foot, run over by a tank on D-Day, which made him hobble crookedly and for his toga that made him look so foolish. Yoyo was plucking an imaginary bass for her benefit, to the Modern Jazz Quartet playing “Skating in Central Park” on Ray’s portable record player. Pete Smith, hunkered in a corner, was out of the reach of her charm, but then she didn’t find him good-looking anyway. Gillian Corbin and Mary Anderson were eclipsed: Mary was asleep among the cushions (and anyway, although she was the best painter out of all the girls, she had buck teeth and thick pebble glasses); Gillian was waiting for a taxi to take her home.

Ray and Pete were arguing about Giacometti, and then about socialism, and then about primitive art. Ray still had his brown face but he had taken off his turban and his mustache. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back to the rows of Penguin and Pelican paperbacks on bookshelves made of painted planks and bricks. Sometimes he waved his pipe dramatically in the air as if he were drawing things; sometimes he closed his eyes, sucking on it. Joyce remembered that he was only twenty-five or — six; when he was teaching she always thought of him as immeasurably older than herself. His eyelids were deep and fine-skinned, crinkled; the flesh on his face was soft and thick; his mouth was red, with a lower lip so swollen it looked as if he had been stung. Someone had said that with his curls and that soft mouth he looked like a cross baby. He was always completely absorbed in whatever one thing he was doing: pouring whisky, constructing an argument, painting. If he tried, say, to pour coffee and talk at the same time, then Iris had to unpick the coffeepot apologetically out of his hands before it got cold.

— What we have to do, he was shouting, is get right up close to Africa. You know, like getting up close to one of those totem figures, one of those really tall ones, with teeth and eyes and bits of hide and bone. We’ve got to frighten ourselves, that’s the truth. All the old taboos, all the old forbidden things. You’ve got to cut through all these layers of fuss, of baby clothes, and all this stuffing, all this stuffy upholstered old Europe with its taboos and its dead skin.

— And what about the Empire? Pete shouted back. What about what’s happening in Kenya? What kind of a civilization is that?

— That’s exactly it, that’s exactly it, said Ray, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

— You’re not making any sense at all. Joyce laughed at them.

— We are, Pete said indignantly. You just don’t properly understand what it is we’re talking about.

When Gillian and Mary had left in their taxi, Iris stood up and said she was going to bed. Joyce thought that she had better go to bed too, although she didn’t really want to; she felt her energy was inexhaustible and she was sure she would lie awake listening to the talk through the wall. The men were passing the whisky round and changing the record. (—You’ve got to hear this, Ray said. This is raw jazz, really raw, really down to the bone, nothing pretty about this.) It would seem presumptuous to stay up without Iris and be the only girl.

The bed in the spare room was left as it must have been when Ray last slept in there. Joyce assured Iris that she didn’t mind not having clean sheets; it had clearly not occurred to Iris that anyone might. Her face was dislocated by a yawn so deep she hardly seemed to hear Joyce saying good night. Joyce undressed, listening to the music and the rumbling of voices through the wall. She had brought her pajamas and her toothbrush in a bag; when she had taken off all her things (thinking that it was the second time she had been naked in this room), she realized she had left the bag in the lounge but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t cold. She climbed in between the sheets in her bare skin and must have fallen asleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow.