Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce pulled the chain and washed her hands and dried them on the pink roller towel. She checked her reflection in the mirror to reassure herself that no shock showed on her face; no, if anything she looked more remote and less flustered than she had been when she arrived. She waited until her legs had stopped the worst of the trembling and then went back downstairs to her cubicle, where Jacqueline plaited her hair, laid the cold steel of her scissors against the nape of her neck, and took the plait off in a couple of wide-jawed crunching bites. It lay in Joyce’s hands, still warm, known intimately to her and yet suddenly strange in its mix of pink and pale gold and ginger.

— It’s a lovely color, Jacqueline conceded, although it’s a difficult color to match with.

Joyce’s head felt light and free. All the time while the junior shampooed her, while Jacqueline chopped away at her hair with a blade set in something that looked like a Stanley knife, and then while she sat with her pin curls in a net under the dryer with cotton wool in her ears, reading a magazine, she felt this curious lightness. The two things seemed to her only equally important: important that her hair should turn out well, important that Ray should have some explanation for why he was on Green Street with Minkie. She didn’t speculate any further; she felt herself poised, for the moment, upon the brink of speculation. She wondered, almost, who the competent elegant-looking woman was who sat in the mirror opposite her, legs carelessly crossed, absorbed in her magazine. She looked as though she had a rich life, full of drama and fun and interesting friends.

— It does suit you, said Jacqueline, when she was combing out the curls, pushing them up with her fingers. Joyce thought Jacqueline saw her too, the suave cool-eyed woman with the easy elfin hairdo and the interesting life. Ever since she came down from the Ladies, her indifference to what was going on around her showing in her face, Jacqueline had treated her with more respect.

Joyce in her new hairdo looked experienced.

Not with the kind of experience her mother’s generation had, pressed down like a dark burden upon their shoulders. This new generation wore it lightly and playfully, like a boy, simplified: free of all the old creaking corset-boned apparatus of women’s troubles.

She left to catch the bus home with the plait wrapped up in tissue, nestled in the dark at the bottom of her bag, weighing it down, even while her new head floated weightlessly on her new bare neck.

* * *

Minkie was late. dud mason and his wife penny and john Lenier were already there when she rang the bell, and they had opened the first bottle of Mateus Rosé wine.

The front door to the flat was down some steps off the drive; it opened onto a long passage floored with linoleum where they kept all their coats and Wellingtons and Ray’s bicycle and the push chair. The lavatory was at the far end of the passage, although everyone was supposed to keep the door shut so you couldn’t see straight in there from the entrance. Joyce had done her best with it, but the passage always made you feel drafty and rather dismal until you went through the glass door to one side and into the carpeted hall. When Joyce opened the front door, there really was a moment’s pause while she expected Minkie to hand her something: that present, soap or sweets or something, that she ought to have been buying when she was out with Ray. Ray hadn’t said anything yet about having seen Minkie earlier, although Joyce had made several opportunities for him to do so. It was dark outside, but the electric lantern above the door was switched on so she could see Minkie peering out palely from where she was swathed in some sort of man’s greatcoat several sizes too big for her. It had begun to rain; from the garden above there came an intimate pattering, drops burying themselves in the thick shrubs.

— I’m so sorry, pleaded Minkie in her baby voice, I’m late and I haven’t brought anything. I’m unforgivable. I really don’t deserve to be let in.

Joyce laughed. She had a suddenly illuminated vision of how dreadful it must have been for Minkie to be asked to dinner tonight, under the circumstances. She could imagine how she must have struggled, trying to make up her mind whether to come or cry off, pretending she had a cold or something. She could imagine, too, how little help Ray had been. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he would have said tetchily. “Just tell her you’re busy or something.” Joyce really couldn’t have done any better if she had contrived the whole thing devilishly.

— Come on in, she said gaily. We don’t care how unforgivable you are. We’re already tipsy.

This was true. She was borne up by the wine swimming in her head; she wasn’t taking her usual care not to drink too much in case of spoiling the cooking. In the warm hall she helped Minkie out of the heavy wet coat; the dark curls were wet all over with tiny droplets of rain. Under the greatcoat she was wearing a sort of green embroidered sarong thing, wrapped tight and flat round her breasts, leaving her shoulders bare. It didn’t really work. Joyce could guess how at home in front of the mirror it had looked like a posture that Minkie could strike: extravagant and original and defiant. But actually it depended on that still posture in the mirror; once she had to move around in it she clearly felt self-conscious and foolish, as if she had dressed up for a part in the wrong play. Joyce in her understated gray dress had the advantage of her.

— I love your hair! cried Minkie. It really suits you.

— Do you? Yes, it was high time. I’d had enough of that silly old look. Come and get a drink.

The guests looked up hopefully toward them as they came into the lounge. Ray was holding forth to Dud about the Summerson Council, which had been set up the year before to report on and validate all the art education courses in the country. This subject touched a painful nerve, Joyce knew. He overreacted ferociously to the modernization the council was encouraging precisely because it galled him to be caught out on the other side, suddenly seeming to stand for traditional values in the face of the new art. He still thought of himself as the new art.

— So what do you think the latest is? he declaimed dramatically, stabbing with his pipe, standing with his legs apart and his back to the oil fire (keeping the warmth off everybody else). I go into the life room at the beginning of the new term, after the Christmas break, and all those beautiful old casts, all those exquisite Greek and Roman and Renaissance forms, are gone. Just gone. All at once after three thousand years they’re not in fashion. We’ve got nothing to learn from them anymore. I try to find out where they are, what’s happened to them. Nobody seems to know. It’s like a murder. I feel as if a murder’s taken place and everyone’s ashamed and nobody will talk about it. The bodies have been got rid of somehow. Did they break them up? I mean, did they actually stand there and hack them to pieces with a hammer? Or did they get poor old Bassett to do it? It would have broken his heart, that’s for sure.

— Minkie hasn’t brought any wine! Joyce announced. Shall we let her have a drink?

She thought she saw him falter for one instant, when he saw Minkie. He screwed up his face in an even more terrible frown.

— I’d like to say we’re in the hands of the barbarians, he shouted, but it’s worse than that. The barbarians at least have a beauty of their own. These people — these idiots, these absolute cretins — they don’t know what beauty is, even to hate it. They don’t know the difference between art and advertising.

— Ssh, said Joyce. Remember the Underwoods. (The Reverend sometimes banged on the floor with his stick if there was jazz or shouting.)