Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

— You can be sure, he said, that whatever goes wrong will be held against you. You know what she’s like.

— Why should anything go wrong? she protested.

And they did find the house: although it was true that Joyce cut her hand folding up Vera’s recalcitrant wheelchair into the back of the car and that, about fifteen minutes into the journey while she was still sucking the blood off her knuckles, rain began to spit out of the slate-gray sky. Vera stared forward through the windscreen with the fixed expression of stoically suppressed anxiety she always wore when Joyce was driving her anywhere, and which always managed to make Joyce drive badly; she shot one amber light with uncalled-for recklessness and then stopped pointlessly at a green one.

There was no sign of the carbon-black factory they had found the last time they looked for the house (Joyce remembers this trip better than she let on to her husband). She felt at least a little lift of triumph at that: the plant with its blight of pipes and machine innards had been so desolatingly and conclusively ugly that she had stifled the idea of it in her thoughts, and now it seemed to have been wiped off the landscape as if it had never existed. But the pattern of roads still didn’t seem to correspond with the pattern in her memory, and after a succession of fairly random turns she had just made up her mind she was lost when Vera saw something and Joyce pulled over to the side of the road.

— Isn’t that it? said Vera.

Joyce didn’t see how she could know. They stared through the rain at some piles of stone across a field. Joyce’s vision was blurry: she really needed glasses now but was too vain to wear them. There was a fuzz of bright green everywhere in her blur, signifying that spring had come; but this was a messy kind of countryside, too flat and too near the city and the motorway and the power station to be anything but scruffy and disconsolate these days, crisscrossed with pylons, the field overgrown with some kind of low scrubby bushes, a solitary cow — no, shaggy pony — lifting its head to look at them. In front of the piles of stone lay something on its side in zigzag folds like the pleats of a concertina.

— We’re looking at it from the back, said Vera. It was on a little hill like that. It’s reclaimed land all around. One of the drainage ditches ran east — west across behind; do you see that line of trees?

Nothing she could see suggested any connection to the past to Joyce.

— Do you want to get out and have a look? she suggested doubtfully. Perhaps if I drive round to the front, there’ll be a track.

— What would I want to do that for? Vera was irritated. She had been excited for a moment, identifying the place, but really it was such a ruin there wasn’t much for them to do except stare at it glumly from the car. Joyce admitted to herself that she had hoped there might at least be the shell of a house they could get close to, or even that it might still be whole and inhabited and that nice people might be living there who might invite them inside to walk around the rooms. She had imagined finding herself in the little stone apple room above the kitchen and all her childhood flooding back. She wouldn’t have admitted this hope of hers to her husband.

— The orchard’s gone, Vera said, and that’s the staircase, lying on its side.

Joyce could see then with a lurch of her heart that the zigzag thing must be a staircase. It was disconcerting, if this really was the place, to think of them climbing up and down it for all those years: it was so pointless now, lying along the ground. And she felt a surge of anger against her aunt, not just for the usual things, the melodramatic intakes of breath when she moved and the dampening remarks and the looming problems of lunch and toilets (they ended up having lunch at the dismal service station just off the motorway before the bridge, where it was easy to manage the wheelchair), but also for ever having spotted the place. If Joyce had come by herself she could have driven round and round and never been certain she hadn’t just missed it or remembered the roads wrongly.

After lunch she drove Vera across the bridge, sightseeing, and then took her back to her own house for supper. Now, in the relief of having Vera safely back in her room in the home and of her own imminent departure, she is saying nice things about their expedition, turning the story of it into a funny and perky one (no doubt the same story she’ll tell her husband later).

— I’d never have seen the house without you, you know. How ever did you pick it out? I’m so envious of your sharp eyes. I don’t think your sight’s deteriorated one bit from what it’s always been. And then your memory’s so good. But it was so strange, to actually see the place. We were so happy there.

— Speak for yourself, Vera says; I wasn’t happy.

Joyce knows she overdoes this determined cheerfulness sometimes. Vera can’t help responding to the flattery, but they are both rather ashamed of it, knowing it’s not the whole truth, knowing it’s compensation. In that room Joyce wants to heap encouragements and admiration on Vera’s head to make up for leaving her here. There’s nothing wrong with the room as such, although it is small. It has a bathroom en suite. The tea that the girls bring is all right; it is made with teabags, but at least they bring milk in a jug. There are wall-to-wall raspberry-pink carpets everywhere in the home and a great emphasis on a hotel-type kind of luxury, with reproduction antique furniture and big vases of silk flowers on tables in the hall. Vera was adamant that she didn’t want a council-run home, and the furniture is the kind of thing she aspired to herself in her middle age, when she had a bit of money to spend. But no amount of pretense that this is just another hotel can quite smother Joyce’s horrible impression of how the ones who live here wait among the remnant of their possessions as if already in transit from their real lives.

When Joyce says she is leaving, Vera has one of her momentary funny turns and reaches round in a panic for her handbag, thinking she’s coming home too; Joyce has to explain. Making her way out, Joyce is swift and free without the wheelchair. She notices that there are no mirrors where you might expect them — in the turns of the corridors, above the little pseudo-Regency occasional tables with their vases piled high with alstroemeria and peonies and lilies — and although she supposes this is not a kindness for the visitors she is quite glad not to come upon herself in here. Two girls are laughing, squealing, making up a bed in a room she passes, the sheets flying and crackling, their voices rising and hushing with that pressured importance which means they are talking about sex. With a rush of the desperate longing that most of the time she’s so good at keeping at bay, Joyce yearns to be identified with them and with all the sap and throbbing promise of the spring evening pouring in through the window beyond them, thrown open high. She’s so glad to leave the home behind and reach the street with ordinary people walking past and get into her car alone and put on a tape, something she scrabbles out of the glove box, a Taj Mahal album Zoe bought her for Christmas.

She leans across the passenger seat to pull out Vera’s crocheted cushion from where it’s slipped down the side of the seat and throw it out of sight into the back: in passing she throws a fugitive, perfunctory glance at herself in the rearview mirror. Like most of the glimpses she has of herself nowadays, it’s not conclusively satisfactory either way. She at least doesn’t catch herself looking like one of those old collapsed ones who have given up. But she isn’t confident either that what she sees — white hair cut in a short bob, tanned crinkled heart-shaped face, distinctive deep-lidded blue eyes, neat late-middle-aged prettiness — isn’t a mere hopeful habit of perception superimposed upon a reality that is in truth slipping away farther and faster than she knows.