Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— It’s the beginning of the end of drawing, said Dud, who was easily made gloomy.

As if overcome, Ray went to change the music on the gramophone, making a show of the delicate care with which he handled the records in and out of their paper sleeves. Predictably, he put on something that Joyce didn’t like, something squeaky and fast and frantic, Mingus probably. This was obviously the part he was going to play tonight: the tormented artist unable because of the scale and purity of his feelings to put on a social show as other people could. There had been a time when Joyce was in awe of him in that vein. He had the same focused glow as when he was working; it gave an edge of concentration to his shambling looks: untidy soft hair he wouldn’t get cut often enough and fleshy pouchy face, like an angel gone to seed. (He was thickening around the waist too; he would have to watch that. With his short legs it wouldn’t suit him.)

She thought their guests already sensed something was wrong. Penny, who was very pregnant, sat guiltily at the edge of her seat as if she felt herself accused of breaking up plaster casts. John Lenier looked as if he was hoping for an opportunity to come in with something funny, to make them all laugh and defuse the gloomily denunciatory mood. He’d probably never even heard of the Summerson Council and couldn’t care less.

— Of course Minkie can have a drink. John leapt to his feet. I’ll pour it for her. What would she like?

Joyce decided that John would be her ally for the night. She liked him anyway. He was tall and lean and took life lightly. With his silky gray hair (prematurely gray; he was only in his twenties, like her) he made Joyce think of a graceful poplar turning up its leaves in the breeze. His cream-colored polo neck was just the sort of thing she wished Ray would wear. He told her what a lovely room this was, what subtle colors she had chosen, and admired her dress and her hair. When he handed Minkie her glass of Mateus he said she looked in her green sarong as if she might dance for them later. Minkie was grateful, but Joyce was pleased that he had felt the need to be kind and rescue the silly sarong and give it a reason for existence.

* * *

Joyce burnt the toast that was supposed to go with the terrine. Also, the creamed potatoes had lumps because she couldn’t be bothered to mash them vigorously enough, and the beef olives were overcooked, and some of the sauce had burned on the bottom of the frying pan. She was completely indifferent to the food, slopping it out carelessly on the plates, eating it without tasting it. She had promised herself for days, in return for starving herself, a portion of chocolate cream pudding, but when it came out of the fridge she didn’t even want any. Only Dud and Minkie ate it.

They had all got riotously drunk somehow. They weren’t used to drinking much these days, and John Lenier had brought a bottle of vodka as well as two bottles of Black Tower. Penny slipped away from the table quite early on and fell asleep on the sofa in the lounge. It wasn’t quite clear whether they were having a fantastic time or whether it was a dreadful disaster. At certain points they were all screaming with laughter, as if everything anyone said was exceptionally miraculously funny, although Joyce could never remember afterward any of their jokes that night, only Dud coming back from the lavatory wearing one of the children’s balaclavas he had picked up from a coat hook in the passage. After that everyone who went came back wearing something until the kitchen floor was cluttered with sou’westers and gloves and umbrellas and Zoe’s scooter (the children were mystified and delighted to find these things in the morning).

At other points, on the contrary, Joyce was suddenly given a vision of their party as a hellhole, a Bosch-like slithering charnel nastiness, where she and Ray exchanged in naked moments a look like a rictus of loathing, seeing down to the very bottom of each other’s obscenely motivated souls. Then it seemed as if what was happening was something so awful and so utterly unlike anything that had ever happened before that in the morning when they were sober they would no longer be able to live together ever again.

Dud told Joyce in low tones (once he was sure Penny was asleep) how he had loved her at art school.

— You remember those little folded cards we had with our timetables on? Every time I knew you were going to be in a lesson, I wrote JS in tiny letters in the corner, on that square.

This was gratifying but familiar territory, and Joyce knew where it led: Dud with his arm around her, or pressing his bear bulk against her under the table, mumbling mournfully about how she was a very special person. Then he would be blushing and full of mawkish contrition when he met her next, hoping she wouldn’t say anything to Penny. She fended him off; it was John she was intent upon. They seemed to be getting on very well, whispering about the others, exchanging ironic looks, he confiding his hopes for a career in photography while she — the words came in her head—“she took a charming interest.” He was full of praise for the beautiful food, although she noticed he left one of his beef olives and stubbed a cigarette out on the plate. He kissed her hand once and held on to it for a few moments, pretending to guess her perfume; she was shocked by the thudding excitement with which her whole body responded to the little game. When she pulled her hand out of his cool silvery grip, he slid his thumb suggestively along her palm; involuntarily she imagined them kissing lips, playing with tongues.

Ray was explaining to Minkie in belligerently insistent detail how if you were drawing the docks you had to begin drawing at the bottom of the steps when the tide was out and then you could move your drawing farther up as the tide came in.

— I don’t understand it, said Minkie miserably, but it doesn’t matter.

— But why don’t you understand it? It’s very simple. An idiot could understand it. You begin at the bottom, when the tide is out.…

Then there was a time when Minkie was lying sobbing on the bed in Ray and Joyce’s bedroom, although it wasn’t ostensibly about the docks, it was because Dud had been describing to her the diseased eyes he was paid to draw for the medical records at the hospital, and although she had told him this was making her feel sick, he wouldn’t stop. Joyce said she was going to check on the children (presumably the children were asleep; perhaps she really did open their door and look in on them, although she had no memory of it), and then she walked into the bedroom, singing a song of her mother’s that used to make her cry when she was a little girl. The bedroom light was off but she could see in the light from the hall behind.

All in the merry month of May

When green buds were a-swellin’,

Young Jimmy Groves on his deathbed lay

For love of Barbara Allen.

All slowly slowly there she came,

And slowly she came nigh him.

And all she said when there she came:

Young lad, I think you’re dyin’.

She had a poor singing voice; she had no idea where the plan came from, with its cardboard-theatrical threat so unlike her usual brisk daytime self. Minkie stopped sobbing and gazed at her with eyes that were swimming in tears and fearful. She lay with one arm flung out across the bedcover; on her wrist was a thick bangle of polished wood. Joyce was convinced all at once that this had been a present to Minkie from Ray, worn tonight for good luck or in defiance.

— I’ll take that, I think, she said, and slipped it off the girl’s limp unresisting hand. D’you mind?

Minkie dumbly shook her head.

(Did she put the bangle on and wear it back to where the others were still shouting and laughing? The next day she found it among the dirty dishes in the kitchen; she took it with her when she went with Daniel out for a walk on the heath and dropped it into a litter bin among the sweet wrappers and lolly sticks, although it was a lovely thing, a shame to lose it.)