Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

* * *

The first thing that went wrong was that when she had got together a bag with all the things the children might need in the afternoon and was just about to put their coats on and fasten Daniel in the push chair, the front doorbell rang and Ann was standing there with a girlfriend.

Ann hadn’t really settled to anything since she finished at the university (she hadn’t done well in her exams; she had had a wild time instead and been the first person in town — by her own account — to wear black slacks so tight-fitting that they had to be zipped up the inside leg). At twenty-six she had been engaged twice and twice broken it off: one had been unsuitably too nice and one unthinkably too nasty (not that that would have stopped her in itself, but it turned out he had been living, all the time they were engaged, with some woman who even had a child by him). She had worked in a shoe shop, and as a nanny for some “ghastly” children, and currently had a job as a waitress at the cafeteria in the zoo. Her latest boyfriend had made Joyce’s heart stop cold in her chest when he was first introduced: he was a gray-faced ratty little man who wore a Teddy-boy draped suit and worked at a bookie’s. Luckily he didn’t seem to be as keen as Ann, and she made all the running, lurking about waiting to catch him as he came out of work, traipsing round the pubs to find where he might be drinking.

Joyce would have liked to have turned her and her friend away there and then, telling them frankly she had no time to stop, but she didn’t have quite that kind of relationship with her sister, and she knew Ann would take offense if she was blunt. Although Ann’s style at the moment was to appear defiantly and extravagantly ordinary, full of contempt at any pretension to superiority, this did not mean that she was indifferent to criticism. In fact she was particularly touchy and quick to imagine she was being condescended to.

— What a shame, Joyce said, frowning and shaking her head as if with real regret. I’m just on my way out. I’ve got an appointment at the hairdresser’s. (She didn’t want to mention the dinner party in case Ann took it into her head to turn up uninvited; she was quite capable of this.)

— Just let us in for a quick coffee, Ann wheedled. We’re absolutely gasping. We’ve been working like blacks.

Under their drooping macs, worn undone with the belts hanging down, they were in their waitress uniforms, striped like nurses’ dresses. The zoo was only ten minutes’ walk away from Joyce’s flat, but Ann hadn’t ever come round in her breaks before, so no doubt this was supposed to be something of an honor.

Joyce looked at her watch.

— I’ve got to take the children round to Mum’s. Auntie’s looking after them. But I suppose I could stop, if it’s just for ten minutes.

— You’re a brick, sis, said Ann, who never called her that. They piled past her in the narrow entrance passage. Both of them had their hair back-combed into bouffant mounds and their faces elaborately made up with black eyebrow pencil, thick mascara, pink lipstick. The friend, who was tall and skinny with a poor complexion, gave a startled hostile look around at the glowing flat.

Ann hugged the bemused children.

— You poor little things, she said. Mummy’s going to leave you with old Auntie Vera. I’ll bet she makes you do lots of horrible jobs for her. That’s what she used to do with me, when she was my teacher.

Daniel began to cry, not because he understood but because he had only just woken up.

— Mummy, we don’t want to stay with Vera, Zoe whined.

While Joyce put the kettle on to boil, Ann took her friend into the lounge.

— Come and look. D’you want to see some paintings by the great artist?

They were smoking; Joyce was sure they were dropping ash on the clean carpet. She overheard them whispering together and then exploding into giggles. In her extreme irritation she forgot her diet and ate two biscuits.

— We reek of elephants, said Ann. We took a ride. Leslie likes the keeper who does the rides.

— I do not, protested Leslie.

The girls bantered private jokes and opinions of the zoo staff over their coffee as if Joyce weren’t there; or perhaps she was required as witness to their devil-may-care fun. It was hard to believe that Ann with her studied flat hardness was the same girl who had once carried a volume of John Donne poems with her everywhere and insisted on reading aloud from it in the street. By the time they finally left, Joyce was half an hour late; she would have to ask to use the phone in the cake shop to persuade the hairdresser’s to hang on for her.

As Ann and Leslie skittered their way down the drive to the gate in their high heels, lighting up more cigarettes (only in order to shock, Joyce was sure), their voices squealing and screeching unnecessarily loudly, Joyce glanced involuntarily up at the windows of the ground floor flat where the Reverend and Mrs. Underwood lived. It was a huge Victorian house: there were two more flats above the Underwoods, let to old ladies. You didn’t often see the Underwoods themselves at their windows, but set into the glass panes in their front room were those kind of ventilators that looked like empty reels of recording tape; these turned and rattled in the slightest breeze, and to Joyce they always seemed to be taking note on behalf of the Reverend of any inappropriate behavior from herself or her family or visitors. He was an old square bear of a man with ragged gray hair, not feminized in the least by his black cassock, whose skirts flew out ahead of him in pace with his long stride; his wife was pale and fragile and oozed a compensatory sweetness. The Reverend growled and barked whenever he met Joyce, often incomprehensibly, always with imperturbable and disapproving authority. Ray and he had had one or two blazing rows, over music in the evenings or the children playing on the front lawn, but Joyce was sure it was for her that the Reverend reserved his most disgusted disapproval. No matter how abjectly friendly and conciliatory she tried to be, she was sure he could see through this to her essential light worldliness.

* * *

She finally got the children settled down with vera. Vera seemed to have girded herself up in an overall for the occasion, as if looking after them might involve particularly dirty work; there was uncharacteristic trepidation in her face. The children were also subduedly ill at ease. Daniel got out his dinky cars; Zoe tipped her jigsaw out on the dining table and stolidly began to sort out the edge pieces.

— She’s so like Kay, said Vera, as she always did. It’s the same face.

Joyce wouldn’t hear of it.

— Not in the least. She’s like Nana Deare; she’s nothing like my family.

And she touched Zoe lightly with the back of her fingers against her cheek, as if to ward off even the remote chance of harm through analogy. She slipped out while Vera was offering the children orange squash and hardened herself when she heard Daniel wail by thinking ahead to the hairdresser’s and the beef olives and the need to brush the lounge carpet again. In the cake shop her mother in her frilled apron and cap was picking out iced fancies with the tongs for a customer and arranging them in a box. Joyce squeezed round the counter into the little cubbyhole at the back, where the phone was fixed on the wall in the midst of a flurry of pinned-up orders and invoices.

— Madam may be delayed now, said the receptionist at Hair Boutique. We always give priority to the clients who arrive in time for their appointments.

— Blast, blast, breathed Joyce to herself, clenching the receiver with her fist in its tan glove that matched her shoes and bag. She hadn’t wanted to arrive there on that footing, flustered and in the wrong. She knew how important it was to assert in these situations one’s serene sense of superiority, from which, firmly established, one could then condescend as nicely as anything if one wished.