Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

She left a threepenny bit for the call beside the phone. Lil looked up from tying the box of cakes with paper string.

— Mrs. H says I can go at three, she said muffledly out of the side of her mouth. Mr. and Mrs. Harper were good employers — they let the staff use the shop phone, for instance, as long as it wasn’t too often — but of course you were not supposed to carry on conversations about your private life in front of the customers. Lil was happy in this job; she enjoyed the camaraderie with the other “girls” and all the minute variations in the same safe daily routine. (Sometimes if Joyce thought back to the days out on the estuary, when her mother had been left alone all day so far from anywhere and with no transport, she wondered how she had ever endured it.)

— I should think Vera’ll be glad of you by then, she whispered back.

— Don’t you worry about her, pet. You go on and enjoy yourself.

Joyce had never been to this hairdresser’s before; she had hardly ever needed to have her hair done, since she had been wearing it for years in a long plait down her back or pinned up behind. But now she had made up her mind to have it all cut off. She had been nursing for several weeks now, a vision of herself, different: freed of the plait and its vaguely East European peasant overtones, too sincere and poignant and wholesome. Her new look would be more urbane and teasing, grown-up and modern and knowing. She was ready for something new, although her thoughts on this as yet didn’t go beyond the hair and the gray dress.

* * *

Hair boutique was on green street, the steep elegant street with the best shops that led down from Benteaston into the center of town. The name was scrawled diagonally in pink cursive script across a plate glass window thickly draped inside with white nylon. It was expensive — Joyce was going to pay ten shillings and sixpence for her cut and set, when she could have got it for five shillings where Lil went — but she dreaded having her idea for her hair misinterpreted, and it had seemed safest to go to the most fashionable place.

The hairdresser — Jacqueline — gazed skeptically at Joyce’s face in the mirror in the little cubicle, playing with her hair, which she had let down from its pins, scrunching it up and then scraping it back. Jacqueline herself was pretty: blond and fine-boned and thin as a wraith, steely with repressed impatience.

— Madam’s face is quite square in shape. Are you sure you don’t want to go for something softer? If you want it short, how about a bubble cut? That suits an extrovert personality. It’s got more bounce to it than the elfin look.

Joyce stuck to her idea but felt nonetheless exposed and foolish. She imagined that Jacqueline picked up her hair with more disdain and brusqueness, once she knew she was not to be persuaded.

— I suppose we could put a few stand-up pin curls in on the crown, she said, making the best of a bad job. That might give it a bit of body.

One of the juniors brought a portable washbasin into the cubicle; it fastened into some kind of plumbing arrangement in the floor. Joyce needed to spend a penny (another thing she had not had time to think of, in her rush) and asked to be directed to the Ladies. As she crossed to the stairs behind the receptionist, dressed in her pink cape with her hair spread out on her shoulders, she happened to glance outside the window. You could see out through the drapes although you couldn’t see in.

Ray was walking down the street right in front of the salon.

Her first reaction was irritation, if anything at all, because this was not a part of the day when she had planned on having to be thinking about him. But there was no reason why he should not be walking down Green Street, which was only five minutes from the art college where he was working in his studio.

Then he paused, as if waiting for someone to catch up with him, and the someone who joined him and walked on with him — as if she might have stopped to look into a shop window for a moment, say — was Minkie, Minkie Gray, who was not only a girl who sometimes modeled for Ray and his students but was also one of their dinner guests for tonight.

Again, for a moment, nothing; and then the beginning of things.

Joyce carried on past the receptionist and up the stairs to the lavatory, which although perfectly clean was not in the same luxurious style as downstairs. She balanced just above the seat to pee as she always did (she knew Mrs. Mellor in the docks was wrong about catching babies from toilets, but doubtless there were other things you could catch), and was hit there with the first real shock of astonished disbelief, so that her legs trembled violently. She quickly pulled up her knickers and straightened her skirt and sat down hard on the closed lid.

Minkie had probably just been sitting for him and they were having a break and going to buy a cup of tea. Or he had been out on his own, perhaps getting that adapter plug he had promised to buy and kept forgetting, and had just bumped into Minkie. Or perhaps it could even be that Minkie had wanted to buy something for her, Joyce, to give her at the party tonight and had asked Ray to help her choose it. Strangely, though this last was the least likely explanation — apart from the improbability of anyone bringing anything more than flowers or maybe chocolates to a dinner party, Minkie never had any money anyway — it was the one that stuck in Joyce’s mind and soothed her the most. She could imagine as if it had already happened the flood of relief and gratitude she would feel when Minkie gave her whatever it was (a scarf? soap? sugared almonds?) and said in her arch little-girl way something about how she “almost had to drag old Mr. Grumpy Guts out with her to help her choose it, he was so cross at being disturbed.” Ray would frown irritatedly and complain to Joyce about her later. These were supposed to be the categories of emotion he felt about Minkie, if he thought about her at all: irritation and a kind of alarmed surprise at her silliness. Joyce could imagine him incandescent at her thinking fit to break in upon his precious work with such a trivial and typically female distraction. (A present indeed! What did Joyce need a present for?)

However, something in the way they had moved together, paused, and then moved on down Green Street made it seem to Joyce that Ray’s reactions to Minkie might need rethinking. Strangest of all was how they hadn’t spoken; she was sure (although as she played and replayed the scene over in her mind she became less sure) that as Minkie swung into step by his side and they resumed their journey down the hill, they had not done what you would expect acquaintances to do and bolstered their being together with interested and mutually accommodating talk. Even if Ray hadn’t been eager to talk, Minkie should have been. But they had simply swung into step together and moved off at one accord, quietly adjusted to each other without words.

Minkie was an odd-looking creature but certainly attractive. She had a cheeky freckled face with a turned-up nose, and a head of short dark loose curls; she dressed in eccentric art student clothes and played up the fact that she looked as if she ought to be buttoned into a red jacket as a pantomime boy. Joyce thought she had been wearing something like that on her way past the window just now, some kind of short military jacket with brass buttons from a jumble sale, although she couldn’t have sworn to it. Minkie was thin and flat-chested: Ray had said her breasts were “pancakes with cherries,” and that had stupidly made Joyce feel safe. It had been Joyce who suggested inviting Minkie to dinner tonight; she was always short of single women, and she had had some vague idea of pairing her up with the single man who was coming, John Lenier, one of Ray’s jazz friends. Ray had neither encouraged nor discouraged her over Minkie — he hadn’t seemed at all interested in the party — although he said something about her barking up the wrong tree with John Lenier. But then Joyce had only thought that men didn’t see these things the way women did.