Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

The idea of Iris was stuck in his mind, of course, quivering and sore like a dark poisoned splinter. Iris had strange moods; there were hours at a time she would sit staring at nothing or with her face wet with tears. When she was like this everything he said was wrong; he crept around the flat guiltily or escaped to meet his friends. Involuntarily he pictured her sitting like this now, numbly absorbed in the idea of his treachery, although she couldn’t actually know about it yet.

— You have a lovely nature, he said, stumbling after Joyce. Mine is so stupid and so ugly. You don’t know me. If you knew me, you wouldn’t want me.

— I know your paintings, she said.

— It’s true. You know my paintings. That’s all you need to know. You see? You understand everything, without even trying.

She stopped still on the path ahead of him.

— All right, she said softly.

He wasn’t sure at first if he had heard her properly. He couldn’t see her face.

— All right, then.

He came up behind her and put his arms around her, reaching inside her jacket so that her breasts were in his hands, springy and jutting in the stiff brassiere she wore under her wool sweater; he kissed her neck on the nape and behind her ears, with the soft tail of her hair in his face. She smelled of bacon and syrup with traces of perfume from last night, wholesome and good. He stood kissing her for long minutes like that, pressing her breasts with his palms, before she turned round in his arms and kissed him back full on his mouth, with a boldness that must mean she had some experience in such things (which after all was probably a relief). Now he couldn’t believe that last night they had lain side by side and he had let her send him back to sleep with Iris.

A man walking his dog had to step into the long grass to avoid them where they blocked the path, grumbling at them disapprovingly.

— We can’t ever go to your flat, Joyce said matter-of-factly in his ear. And you’ve seen mine. We won’t ever be able to be alone, you know.

He suggested something hesitantly, fearful she might be offended.

— I’ve got keys to my parents’ house. They’re away at Torquay with my sister for a week’s holiday. I’m looking after the cat.

She put up no fight at all. He felt her give way; she sagged heavily against him.

— When? she said. When can we go there?

— I don’t know. What about your mother?

— She’ll be all right. Is it far?

— The other side of Benteaston, in St. Peter’s. About forty minutes’ walk.

— Do you have the key on you?

— Yes, he said, feeling in his jacket pocket. Oh, God. And some scraps for the cat.

He pulled out the greasy package done up in waxed bread wrappings that Iris had given him to take.

— I’d forgotten all about these.

— You won’t ever be able to talk again about my lovely nature, Joyce said, with her face pressed against his shoulder. Don’t think I don’t know what I’m doing, deceiving Iris. Don’t think I don’t know it’s wrong.

— We aren’t going to deceive her, Ray said. I’m going to tell her. In the next few days I’m going to tell her. You’re the one. I’m going to marry you.

He hadn’t known this was true until the words were out.

He was full of fear of Iris — the idea of her and of what was going to have to happen to her seemed wrapped in thick and ugly shadows. He was also angry at her, because she made what he had to do so difficult.

— Don’t be silly, Joyce said, without lifting her head from his shoulder to see his face, laughing muffledly, happily. Don’t be so silly. It can’t be true.

* * *

Joyce hadn’t thought at all about his parents’ house while they were on their way there. It had been merely their destination, aimed at blindly as they hurried with their burning purpose along the quiet Sunday streets. (Really, she pictured them burning with it, the suburban pavements along which they passed scorched and flaming behind them.) She had imagined how they would turn to each other once they were alone at last, but she had not imagined any particular setting for this clinching encounter, no furniture or rooms. She knew things about his family that should have prepared her for just the kind of place it was: his father working for the Co-op, his mother with her whist drives, his sister at secretarial college. He had dropped her hand as they approached; of course, the neighbors knew him and would know his wife. A tall tabby hailed him in a hoarse accusing meow from where it waited on the doorstep beyond a little green-painted gate, and he spoke back to it, apologizing for being late. The house was on a corner in a quiet avenue of similar houses, fringed fawn blinds at its windows, a striped sun awning rolled up above the front door, two apple trees and an Anderson shelter in the back garden. If it had been a slum, with cracks in the walls and damp running down and crusts of bread on the floor, Joyce would have taken it in her stride. But she stopped short in the entrance hall when they had shut the front door behind them, disconcerted because it was so ordinary.

The hall was dim, the blinds were drawn; spilled drops of sapphire and ruby glowed on the tiled floor where light came through the stained glass in the porch. With Timmy the cat winding under his feet, Ray led her through a dining room with a tall wooden over-mantel and a ticking clock and brass fire irons; pools of pale light were collected on the high-polished table and sideboard. There were dark squares and rectangles of paintings hung by chains from the picture rail, but Joyce knew without looking that they weren’t Ray’s or anything remotely like Ray’s; they were cows wading in brooks rusty with sunset light or yearning shepherdesses on the moors. It wasn’t quite like anywhere that Joyce herself had ever lived: more — much more — comfortably furnished and prosperous than anything Lil had ever been able to afford; not as eccentric and distinguished and ramshackle as the old house in the estuary; more old-fashioned than Aunt Vera’s bright flat with its pale blue Formica kitchen. She watched Ray hunting in a cupboard in the breakfast room for a plate to put the cat’s scraps on. He was still mysterious, the artist with the gift of knowledge. But he was also, after all, just the boy who had grown up in this house, and played with his sister under the shelter, and knew where the forks were kept and where the matches were, and had been given, like her own brother, a printing set or a penknife for Christmas. (He showed her afterward where he had in fact tried out his new penknife, years before, on the arm of his mother’s leather-covered chair.) This vision of his familiarity, like a vision of their closeness to come, was more shocking to her, more absolutely a revolution in her apprehension of everything, than even the flame of excitement as she waited for him to take her upstairs and make love to her.

— I do know you, she said into his neck, wrapping herself about him from behind while he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. I do know who you are.

— I know you do, said Ray, that’s why I’ve chosen you.

— Sometimes you’ll wish I didn’t. You’ll wish I was someone more remote and lofty minded.

— At this moment, he said, I can’t contemplate it. Not with you pressed up against me like that.

He brought sheets, and they lay down under a green silk eiderdown in his old room, which was papered with a pattern of green trellis hung with baskets of flowers. Joyce said she would launder the sheets and iron them before his mother came back. Probably it was strange for him, this bringing her here to his childhood bedroom; he was more shy and self-doubting than she had imagined, after all his talk. They didn’t put on any lights or draw the curtains, in case the neighbors saw. Ray brought in a portable enamel paraffin stove; as the hours passed and it grew dark outside, an image of the pattern of diamonds cut in the top of the stove was cast tremblingly onto the slanting ceiling.