Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— It’s Joyce, she said. Something’s happened. I need to talk to you. Can I come round?

At least he didn’t sound as if she’d woken him from sleep; he was sober and careful.

— Joyce? Oh, dear. Well, of course you can. Where’s Ray? Wouldn’t you rather that I came to you? I could easily pop my things on.

— Oh, no. It’s easy now. I’m already out; I don’t want to go back. Just tell me how to get to where you live.

She thought he’d offer to come out and find her; instead, after a moment’s thought he gave her precise directions to his address. (It wasn’t far, a ten-minute walk, a few streets away.) The real man, of course, was never going to be as obediently pliant to her desires as his simulacrum in her fantasy; it was understandable that he responded guardedly to this casual party flirtation returned upon him, rawly exacting. No wonder, even, that he wanted to know about Ray; husbands begin to count when things get serious. Nonetheless, something in his voice cooled her and warned her off, so that by the time he opened his door to her ten minutes later in the red silk paisley dressing gown that somehow suddenly made everything come clear — he might almost have put it on to help explain — she was all ready for her disillusion. The dressing gown gave it away like a piece of crude stage machinery signaling a point; even to her, who had been so obtuse, so sure of her command of the way things were, so oblivious to essential missing pieces of information. This must have been what Ray was trying to tell her while she was busily planning, first, to have John for Minkie, then for herself.

It was simply never mentioned after that between her and John: the possibility that she had come to him in hopes of something rather more than the clean handkerchief and cocoa he considerately provided, or that he might have ever had to deliver up to her the awkward explanation of why he would not be able to play his part in her revenge. Instead, awareness of all this hovered with an effect of high comedy between them and made them get on rather well, as if they had been together through some danger narrowly skirted. Even though she poured out her story to him, crying copiously into his handkerchief, and told him things she had never spoken of to anyone else about the difficulty of living with Ray, and even though John consoled her so tactfully with his calm estimate of the unimportance of what had happened, nothing that they said to each other seemed completely serious. At some point the conversation even turned to her admiration of the way he’d done his flat, which was all black and white with a spatter of bright colors in the cushions and rugs.

— He doesn’t really like her much, said John, thinking back over his impressions from the evening. I’d never have had any idea of anything between them, if you hadn’t told me.

— No, he doesn’t like her much. He thinks she’s silly.

— Well, bless her, she is, rather.

— Don’t bless her. I want to tear her hair and scratch her eyes out.

— No, you don’t. She’s a daft little girl who thinks it’s clever to pout and play baby. She isn’t even worth wasting your anger on. She’s a little shallow pond and you’re a lake, a deep still lake, just a little bit ruffled on the surface for the moment.

— Oh, John, you’re so nice to me. I only wish I believed that Ray thought that.

— He’s not an idiot, is he? Don’t you think he knows it? Look, what you need is to get some beauty sleep, go home, forget about making any ugly scenes. He knows you know; you don’t need to say anything more. Just be your gorgeous self, make yourself look like the sophisticated glamorous woman you are, cook him one of your wonderful meals, put on the lamps and the music, take the time to sit down and talk with him about painting or whatever, and don’t you think he’ll put some important questions to himself about why he’s been playing around? D’you think he wants to sit down and talk about art with Minkie? Maybe it’s been difficult for him, with the children. Maybe things haven’t been everything they used to be, between you. Buy yourself some gorgeous new underwear and some perfume and make him fall for you all over again.

— Oh, I know I could do that, she said, frowning.

— Well, of course you could.

— I don’t know whether it’s what I want to do.

Eventually John brought a pillow and sheets and blankets and made up a bed for her on his sofa, where she fell almost instantly asleep, with no idea what time of day or night it was, except that it was still dark.

* * *

When she woke she could just make out the shapes of objects in the room in a gray dawn light. Her head felt clear, she was perfectly well, she must have worked right through the terrible hangover that surely had been in store for her in all the excitement of the night before: her escape into the dark, her tears, and her pouring out of all her troubles. These had used up all the poison in her.

She woke thinking about Ray: not about Minkie and all the stuff from last night, but about his work. His latest paintings, for the last eighteen months or so, had been something new. He was putting the paint on more smoothly, and if you drew your attention away from the surface details of the brushwork, you could suddenly see revealed a glimpse of likeness, verisimilitude, as if under the necessary play of the paint he had trapped a shadow of the real presence. Joyce knew that this mixture of an expressionistic style with some of the devices of illusionism was an eccentric and original technique, and she knew what a practiced virtuoso handling of the paint was required to produce such a complex effect. The other thing he had changed was the way he arranged the bodies on the canvas, his new cramped picture space with body parts improbably crowded together. Some of the new nudes had startled and unsettled Joyce when she first saw them: he had asked the model to take a contorted position, legs apart, genitalia brutally exposed and foregrounded, the model perhaps looking out from the picture with her head almost upside down, twisted under her knee. The models could only hold these contortions while he made quick sketches. When he worked the sketches up into paintings, he didn’t square the drawings up as he used to do; he copied freehand and exaggerated the distortions and the improbability.

These were beautiful pictures, Joyce was sure of that. She knew she was able to make an objective estimate of his work because she also had an uncanny instinct for when his paintings failed, which came from knowing him so well, recognizing when he was weak or false or trying to cover up something he couldn’t do. These new ones frightened her, but they weren’t ugly. They looked unflinchingly deep into the layered appearances of flesh, seeing things that were true. She trusted him, not personally but objectively, that he was able to see the truth: not in their daily life, when he was often wrong, but beyond it. She could see it when it worked, the translation of the truth of life into pictures, but she couldn’t do it for herself. My love for him rests on that, she thought. Everything rests on that.

It had been awhile now since she had modeled for him; he had made some drawings of her pregnant with Daniel, and afterward breast-feeding him, but because of the children there simply wasn’t time these days for her to sit for long enough. She had even been glad that it had stopped; there had seemed to be something irreconcilable between her two roles, as the effective manager of his domestic life and as the still mute object of his study, on whom he concentrated, but as if she wasn’t there. Sessions with him weren’t necessarily calm or good-tempered, either; if he was struggling, scraping off paint or screwing up drawings, she used to feel responsible, drained by the intensity of his effort but helpless to make it work, angry with his anger because it seemed self-indulgent, not directed at real things. Now she was sorry; she wanted that discomfort back. She thought that perhaps Minkie had modeled for one of those searing nudes, exposed and altered by his scrutiny.