Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

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Joyce changed her mind, later, about iris’s paintings. years later she bought one of Iris’s small oils that she saw in an exhibition of local artists. This was when all the turmoil was behind them, all the shouting and weeping and shamed relatives and clumsy ugly self-justification; they had arrived by then at a point where she and Iris could even occasionally meet at the same parties, although they ignored each other. Iris was painting under her maiden name, Iris Neave, although she did remarry (she never had children). She must have recovered from the crisis of confidence in her work that she had once spoken of to Joyce.

The painting was of a little cream jug and a spoon on a white tray cloth edged with lace. It was curious how Iris, who was no good with real food or hospitality (Joyce was the one who turned out to be good at these things), should choose so consistently to paint domestic objects: fruit and cakes and labeled jars of jam; teapots and sugar tongs and plates of nuts and cheese.

— Dainty, said Ray, so dainty it makes me want to smash something. How can she still want to paint as if the world hasn’t changed? Tray cloth indeed! Who uses a tray cloth these days? It’s too pretty; don’t you think it’s saccharine and mendacious? (It was he who seemed to have clung on longer to the need to justify himself: he wasn’t ever very nice about Iris.)

But Joyce didn’t think so, although she didn’t try to explain and didn’t really even examine for herself what it was she liked about the picture. If she happened to glance at it, it was a soothing still point in her busy days. She liked the careful continence of the brushstrokes. She liked its irony (Iris surely knew the tray cloth was old-fashioned?). She liked the idea that the cream was held there inside the jug and never poured.

It had been going to be such a lovely Saturday.

Full, and busy, but Joyce didn’t mind that. In the morning, while Daniel had his nap and Zoe played, she made the chocolate cream pudding from a Len Deighton recipe cut out from the newspaper: cream, eggs, sugar, butter, brandy, chocolate. The family had been eating meanly for a week — beans on toast, tomatoes on toast, plates of cheese and lettuce for her — so that she could splash out on this dinner party. She stuck sponge finger biscuits like a palisade all around the cut glass bowl Lil had given her, then poured the chocolate mixture into the middle and put it in the fridge to set. She impressed herself by resisting the temptation to taste any or scrape out the bowl and as a consequence felt gratifyingly hollowly thin.

When she had washed up the cooking things, she had time to sit down at the table and drink a black instant coffee while Zoe had squash and biscuits. Zoe — a steady shy four-year-old, with light brown hair cut short like a boy’s — was taking advantage of Daniel’s being out of the way to fill in her magic coloring book; you brushed the drawings with plain water and like a miracle colors sprang out from the page. She worked painstakingly and neatly, her tongue stuck out in concentration, on a panting dog with its head cocked winningly sideways, boys playing ball in a suburban garden, a little girl in a maid’s apron and cap. Ray had groaned in real pain when Zoe first brought the coloring book home (his mother had bought it for her); he threatened to throw it out, but Joyce understood the appeal of these happy obedient pictures and had signaled frowningly to him not to make a fuss. Anyway, Ray had soon forgotten about the book’s existence.

Yesterday Joyce had dusted and vacuumed and washed floors until she was sweating and gritty with dirt. Today, for the first time in weeks, the sun shone into their basement flat: a weak sweet early spring sunshine that fingered its exposure into some forgotten corners and found out cobwebs, so that she had to get her duster out again. She didn’t mind the excuse for gazing critically around her. The rooms awaited company like a stage set: centered on the distinction and seriousness of Ray’s paintings, glowing with the careful thought and tending she had put into all that surrounded the paintings, the tasteful and original furniture and ornaments. She was full (it had turned out) of ingenuity and practical resourcefulness: she knew how to make their flat look modern and stylish even on Ray’s meager income (he was only working part-time at the college and hadn’t sold much work this past couple of years). She had rescued some dainty kitchen chairs someone had put out for a Guy Fawkes night bonfire and painted them with black enamel. She had had flat squares of foam cut and covered them in thick colored cottons, orange and olive green and mustard yellow, then piled them up in a block. She spread tall grasses and flower heads out to dry on newspapers above the immersion heater in the airing cupboard and arranged them in two old earthenware tobacco jars she had bought in a junk shop for a shilling. The look she went for was contemporary Scandinavian, earth colors and clean shapes: a black wrought-iron candelabrum, stainless steel cutlery, coarse-woven linen place mats.

The plan was that when Daniel woke up she would take him and Zoe round to her mother’s. Lil still lived at the same flat in Benteaston, along with Martin, who was studying for his doctorate in chemistry and working as a laborer building the new bypass. There Aunt Vera would look after them until Lil finished work at the cake shop. Aunt Vera did have grandchildren of her own, but they were in America, so she yearned for a share in Joyce’s. She was not exactly a natural with small children. Daniel and Zoe preferred Grandma Lil, who would greet them with bags of leftover cakes and arms open wide, shouting, “Who’s my bestest bestest girl (or boy) in all the world, then?” But they tolerated Vera and her shy stiff efforts to be strict with them and to encourage Zoe’s reading and get Daniel to talk. (She reproached Lil for using baby language with him, insisting that this would “hold him up”; Lil took no notice.)

When she had left the children, Joyce had an appointment at the hairdresser’s; after that she would come back to the flat by herself and get on with cooking the fiddly beef olives she was doing for the main course. The little packages of thinly sliced beef spread with mushroom stuffing had to be tied with threads individually before they were sautéed. She had made the chicken liver terrine for the first course the night before. Ray would pick the children up on his way back from the college, and there would be plenty of time to get them into bed and asleep before the guests arrived. Joyce already knew what she was going to wear: she had made herself a new low-cut dress from a piece of gray slubbed silk left over from the days of the dressmaking business she had before the children came along. It had a difficult deep cowl neckline, three-quarter-length sleeves, and a peg skirt: she had bought a narrow black patent belt to wear with it. It was hanging now against the wardrobe in the bedroom, with a piece of tissue paper round the neck to protect it from dust, ready to put on after her quick last-minute bath. She could already imagine herself, moving suavely in the sexy top-heavy way forced by the shape of the skirt, wafting perfume, welcoming the guests into the rooms, enticingly lit by well-placed lamps and rich with the smells of the food cooking. Miles Davis would be weaving his spell from the record player.

Of course it would be up to Ray what record he put on. Sometimes he didn’t choose the kind of thing that Joyce wanted; if he was in a certain mood he might put on very far-out noisy fast jazz that nobody else really liked. But there was no point in worrying now about what his mood would be, at a point when there was nothing she could do about it.