Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

* * *

When she woke up she had no idea how long she had been in there or how many hours the others had gone on talking; the lounge was silent now and the flat was dark. What she knew was that someone was in bed with her: a naked man. She could feel him bulky and hot and soft beside her; she could smell him, a spicy mix of sweat and spirits and smoke and something personal, a green smell like cut grass. She was sure the man was asleep because he was breathing through his mouth, heavily, in a broken snorting pattern; he must be lying on his back. She too was on her back. She had no idea how long he might have been there. In her dreams, perhaps, she had been aware of an arrival, of a stirring of accommodation to another presence. In her dreams she must have let him climb in, as if this were something understood between them. It was his snorting breath that had waked her.

It was so dark she could not see anything, not her own hand in front of her eyes, let alone the face of the man whose heat was radiating against her where her thigh touched his. And yet, in spite of the dark, in truth she knew immediately who he was. (It was not only her thigh that touched him. She could feel under the toes of her left foot the hairy calf of his right leg, and his right arm was thrown heavily, carelessly, across her belly, palm up. Vividly, too, she was aware of them circulating the same air in their noisy breathing; she could taste the whisky in it.) It would have made perfect sense for it to be Yoyo; although it wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge that they had slept together, he might have been tempted by such a lucky opportunity as this, might have pretended to settle down on the floor in the lounge and then crept into her room later. But Yoyo would surely have wakened her. And anyway, she never for one moment thought it was Yoyo, whose presence in a bed was light and neat as a boy’s. She put her hand to where this man’s head should be on the pillow and felt curls, damp and short, and then with her fingers felt bits of a face, incomprehensible in its arrangements in the pitch dark but known to her, known vividly.

She leaped up into a sitting position, pulling away from where she touched against him as if she was burned.

— Mr. Deare, she hissed, Mr. Deare! Wake up! You’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve come to the wrong bed. I’m in here.

For a long moment there was no response, only a whistling exhalation on a different prolonged note. Then the snoring broke off and he also sat up abruptly in alarm; he grabbed her painfully tightly by the shoulders, as if she needed protecting from something, or he did.

— Who are you? he whispered urgently into the dark.

— It’s Joyce, she said, Joyce Stevenson.

— And what am I doing in here?

— I think you made a mistake. You came to bed, and you forgot that Iris said I could stay the night.

— Jesus Christ. I wasn’t asleep?

— You were. You must have gone right off to sleep. Then I woke up.

— Jesus Christ.

It was so strange that they couldn’t see each other, although he held her tightly in his hands for these few minutes while they spoke. He groaned, a groan out of all proportion to what had happened: as if he confronted a wholesale indictment of his irresponsibility, his drunkenness, his insensitivity.

— I’m such an idiot, he urgently whispered at her.

— No, not at all, it was an easy mistake to make; it doesn’t matter.

— It does, it does, he hissed, insisting. What should I do now?

— Just go back to your own bed. There’s no need for us to mention anything to Iris. There’s nothing to mention.

— All right, he said, are you sure?

— Of course I’m sure. Nothing’s happened.

— All right. If you’re quite sure.

As he let go of her and moved to feel his way out of the bed, his right hand fell from her shoulder — palm open, hot and damp from where he had gripped her — and brushed quickly across her breasts, so quickly she couldn’t be sure whether it was an accident or not.

— Good night then, she said into the dark. Don’t worry about it.

— You’re very good to make no fuss. I hope I’ve got all my clothes.

— If there’s anything here in the morning I’ll put it out on the landing.

— I suppose this is all really very funny.

— It is, she whispered firmly. It’s terribly funny.

When he had gone she lay awake, parched and nauseated with hangover, feverish with consciousness of what had happened. She had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet she felt that something precious had been spoiled; she wished she never had to see Ray Deare again. She also wished she dared to slip into the lounge and fetch her pajamas out of her bag, so she could cover herself up; her naked breasts felt hot and heavy and she ached from imagining, over and over, although she forbade herself, his hand across her front.

* * *

The next day, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, someone rang the doorbell of the Stevenson flat in Benteaston.

They were all at home. Lil and Joyce and Ann were washing up Sunday dinner. Martin was excused from washing up in return for polishing shoes; he had these spread out on sheets of newspaper in the middle of the carpet in the front room and put on a great appearance of rubbing and buffing every time one of them came through, although it was obvious he was mostly engaged in reading all the articles in the paper. He read things out to them from time to time.

— Listen to this. “House painter hypnotizes woman while her teeth are extracted.”

Lil, who had read the paper through already that morning, obliged by exclaiming in astonished sympathy.

—“Widow leaves six thousand pounds, car, house, and wines to chauffeur.” “Man digging in garden finds unexploded bomb.”

Ann and Joyce ignored him. They got through the mountain of dirty dishes and pans in a trance of uncommunicative efficiency, only scowling if they bumped up against each other in the cramped little kitchen while they were putting things away. It was Joyce who hung her soggy tea towel over her shoulder and went to see who was at the door. Sometimes some of her college friends came over on Sunday afternoons to take her out for a walk on the heath.

Ray Deare stood on the path, hangdog and miserable, with his shoulders hunched up and his hands thrust into the pockets of his tweed jacket. Joyce hadn’t seen him again since she’d found him in her bed; she had slipped out of the Deares’ flat early in the morning before anyone was up. There were traces of brown makeup in front of Ray’s ears and in his eyebrows. It was a muffled gray day, cool for summer, very still. In the tiny paved front garden the blooms on the aged pink standard rose that Lil had tried to prune into shape sagged gloomily earthward, turning brown before they’d opened.

— I couldn’t believe you’d just gone, he said. You left this. I thought I’d better bring it.

He held out the little pink-painted bag she had forgotten, with her pajamas and toothbrush inside. Joyce supposed he was miserable because she had blundered into his sacred privacy, even though it was through no fault of her own. There were things about him that he must know she would not be able to forget: his yielding hot soft flesh; his smell close up, sweet and ripe like grass; his humiliating shy panic when he discovered his mistake. And now nothing that she did would ever be right for him again. She wondered how he’d found out where she lived.

The woman from the flat upstairs was hanging over the banisters with curiosity, her hair in curlers and a net.

— Is it for you, dear? Joyce reassured her it was, but she made no move to retreat.

— I just had to come and apologize for yesterday, Ray said.

— There was really no need. Do you want to come in?