Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

At some other point that evening they were all talking about Mary Anderson. When she was at college with Dud and Joyce she was an odd-looking girl with elderly parents and thick pebble glasses, under which her eyelashes grew long and luxuriant as if in a greenhouse. Now she was making a name for herself as a painter.

— I remember I told her to go to the Dubuffet exhibition in ’fifty-nine, said Ray. That’s what you can see in these latest paintings, that sort of inspired graffiti. The Dubuffet set free something in her imagination. That’s what they don’t understand, these idea men: that you can be free, and yet paint in a tradition.

— Because she can draw, said Dud. Even though they aren’t naturalistic forms, it’s there, the truth in the pencil.

Joyce envied Mary, for those minutes, desolatingly.

— But would you want to go to bed with her? she laughed.

She couldn’t believe, the moment she’d said it, that she was capable of anything so stupid. She and Ray stared at each other; she imagined that their pupils were dilated like cats’, gaping blackness.

— I would, said Ray. She’s mysterious.

— Mysterious? What’s mysterious? You didn’t use to think that. That just means ugly. You’re just impressed because she’s somebody now.

— Yes, I suppose I am. It’s something, that she’s somebody.

— You men! she exclaimed, flinging her arm in a grand gesture of disgust, knocking over a glass. Although after all it was she who had said the stupid thing, who had lowered everything to the personal, sexual question.

* * *

Eventually the reverend underwood came thundering at the front door knocker in his pajamas and dressing gown. He and Ray engaged in a shouted argument while the guests, half relieved at being shaken out of the evening’s dark tangle, hurriedly got their things together and made subdued farewells.

— Thanks for a lovely time, whispered Penny, snugly rounded, blinking from her innocent sleep. I’m sorry I’ve missed all the fun. Dudley loves coming here.

Usually after their dinner parties Joyce and Ray cleared up in fatigued companionable silence, moving coordinatedly around each other under her command, piling up plates and emptying ashtrays. Tonight Joyce gave one shuddering look at the mess; her bones ached and her head swam and she was nauseated. She was incapable of restoring order. She didn’t even want to. While the front door was still open and Ray was saying goodbye to John and Minkie, she clambered out of her clothes in the half-dark bedroom, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and lay down on her back in the bed in her baby-doll short nightdress, keeping still as a statue, staring at the ceiling, listening to Ray padding round the rooms, turning the lights off, checking at the children’s door.

She knew that when he came to bed he would want to make love to her; his heart would be pounding from his furious quarrel with the Reverend Underwood and he would want calming down. She waited for him like a stone, promising herself to endure it as unforgivingly as if she were having an examination at the doctor’s. It seemed to her that if she could just keep her mouth closed on this silence she would be punishing him, holding on to what he didn’t know she knew, even though it lay huge and heavy in her head. She was quite sure he hadn’t an idea that she had guessed. He would have to wait for Minkie to tell him (women were so much better at these things), and she imagined that even then, even when he came to her with big dog eyes full of contrition, wanting to explain, she would refuse to speak about it to him.

— Should I put the leftovers in the fridge? he asked, standing in the doorway, aggrieved at having to do her chores; he thought she’d flaked out on him because she was tipsy.

— Put them wherever you want.

For another few minutes she heard him banging things ill-temperedly around in the kitchen; then he came and climbed into bed and, after a bit, reached out and touched her breast, which was their sign. Obediently she got up and put in her cap in the bathroom.

— Only if you’d like to, he said.

— I don’t mind.

She lay as if she were an effigy on a tomb. He labored on top of her, and she pressed her nails into her palm because it was disgusting and thought the words “his hairy rump,” although that wasn’t fair, he wasn’t particularly hairy. Toward the end she pretended, and stirred about a bit, just to get it over. She thought she only wanted him to fall asleep and leave her alone to think. At the same time she felt so sad, and even ashamed, that the thing that had been so transforming and incandescent between them could have become as diminished and miserable as this.

His climax, though, groaning and collapsing on top of her, affected her as unpredictably if he’d released a spring: not of sexuality but of rage. As he rolled off her she pushed away from him and leaped out of the bed.

— I’m off, she said. I’m going.

He propped himself up on his elbows, startled out of postcoital relaxation.

— What do you mean? What’s the matter?

— I’m going. How could you?

— How could I what? You said you didn’t mind.

She went into the bathroom and washed herself in cold water and then dressed, though not in the gray dress; she felt herself trampling that under her feet as she moved backward and forward in the room, choosing slacks and a striped cotton top from her drawers, pulling a comb through her hair, picking up to take with her in her handbag a change of knickers and her toothbrush and makeup bag and perfume.

Ray by this time was standing uselessly beside the bed; he had put on his pajama bottoms for decorum’s sake.

— What’s going on here? What’s all this about?

— I’m going, she said. Where does John Lenier live?

— Jesus Christ, Joyce, what are you talking about? You’re making a terrible mistake.

— I’m talking about M-i-n-k-i-e. Someone who was here tonight. Some nice little cream pancake with cherries on top. But two can play at that game. Don’t bother to tell me where he lives. I’ll take the address book.

* * *

She didn’t know how much it was really about john lenier.

There was no doubt that, as she left the house and hurried through the dark windy night to the telephone box (John’s address wasn’t in the book but his telephone number was), she was full of a sexual excitement focused on him. She wasn’t imagining that she would take much time telling him how she felt about Ray and Minkie; all that was needed was a bare explanation of the need to make up for everything that had been spoiled in her bed just now. Her rage was a license: her mind feverishly threw up fragments of scenes with John — his grateful astonishment, his hesitating and at first elaborately courteous advances, that languorous delicate alertness of his applied to her, bent over her, minutely responsive to her pleasures, taking his own with an exquisiteness she intuited in him. More, too: other things flashed in her mind’s eye, an accelerating daring, initiations into new things (she wasn’t specific as to quite what new things), an open-eyed consent to some definitive crossing into adult territory. It was high time, she thought, that she grew up.

If John had been another man, the night might have had a very different outcome: the things dreamed up in fantasy might have taken on solid form, everything from then on might have turned out differently.

On the other hand, as soon as she knew he wasn’t going to play the part she had imagined for him, his importance fell away as if it had never existed, releasing her into a kind of calm and disclosing her real situation in a new perspective. Perhaps she knew she had made a mistake as soon as she spoke to him in the phone box, her whole body shaking so profoundly in time to her heart’s thumping that it even distorted her voice; the box meanwhile was being buffeted from outside, gusts of wind rattling twigs against the glass.