Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

How had she imagined that this man might be chastely domesticated, on her terms? She had hung his pictures in her home as if she could gloss over what was inside the frame and use it as a sign of taste merely, to hang among other signs, curtains and lamps and interesting objects from the junk shops.

Joyce cleaned her teeth and washed her face in John’s bathroom (lucky that she had brought her toothbrush), surprised and pleased by her reflection in his mirror with its new short hair.

She should go back.

Perhaps if she went now she might even get there before the children woke up.

* * *

She let herself into the flat with her key. probably the Underwoods heard her coming back just as they must have heard her leave last night (she always imagined them side by side in a vast mahogany bed, listening from under some sort of overhanging ecclesiastical ornamentation), but she didn’t care. All was quiet. She thought Ray would probably be asleep; she would embark on the clearing up and then make breakfast for him and percolate real coffee when he woke up. She slipped off her shoes and crossed quietly to their bedroom in her stocking feet; the door was slightly open, as they always left it, so as to hear the children if they cried out in the night.

Ray was sitting in all his clothes at the window, where it was becoming light, and day outside: a tentative spring day under veiled blue skies, meek after the tantrums of last night, smelling of the soaked earth of gardens (she was exhilaratedly saturated in it as he couldn’t yet be, from her walk home through the early streets where she met only the milkman). When he saw her in the doorway he jumped up off the wooden chair where she usually piled her clothes at night.

— Hello. You can’t have been very comfortable, she said.

— I wasn’t. He hesitated. Did you mean the chair? Or about — things?

She laughed. Both of them were using subdued undertones, so as not to wake Daniel. Zoe was a lie-abed, but Daniel was an early bird, usually first calling to them from his cot around six or half past.

— Both, probably.

— Well, no. No to both.

— What are you doing up? You’ll be exhausted.

He looked at her suspiciously.

— Have you been asleep, then?

— After my night of torrid passion.

— Was it? His voice cracked somewhat.

— What do you think?

He was exaggeratedly relieved, flinging his arms up as if he had kept them by his sides in a tension of suspense.

— I was beginning to wonder. I did try to tell you.

— You didn’t try all that hard.

— Is it funny?

She smothered her giggles in her hands.

— Probably. When you come to think about it. My crazy fling. A trip to the moon, on gossamer wings. Have you been sitting there all night?

— Waiting for you. But not all night. I cleared up.

— Oh, you didn’t. Not all on your own? How awful!

— It was awful. Not the clearing up. An awful night.

— I know. Listen.

But she didn’t know at first what she had to say. She crossed the room to where he stood and stopped just a few inches in front of him, so that they could feel each other’s body warmth rolling off them in the cold morning and taste each other’s breath, hers minty, his stale and boozy. His clothes from the night before were crumpled and his hair was disheveled and his face pasty and gray around the jowls with stubble. It seemed a comically appropriate atonement, that he had kept his dismal vigil while she slept those hours away at John’s as easefully as an angel.

Ray put his hands up to take her shoulders, but she caught them in hers and held him off.

— I don’t want any lying, she said.

He shook his head mutely.

— Not from either of us, I mean. Not from me either, about what I feel. It makes me want to kill you, when I know you’ve slept with her. It makes me feel desperate and helpless. I don’t know what to do.

— It didn’t mean anything.

— No, it did, it did. That’s just what I don’t want you to say. It did mean something.

— OK, it meant something. He shrugged. But not what you think.

— I don’t know what I think. What did it mean?

— I suppose it was just sex. How can I put it? However I put it, I’m in the wrong, don’t think I don’t know that.

— Don’t talk about wrong and right. I don’t want us to be together because of the old rule book.

— I see.

— And that was a lie already. Coming from you. “Just sex.” That word “just” is a lie, to hide its importance from me.

He searched her face, to see how much he could say.

— All right, that was a lie. I was obsessed with her for a short while. Perhaps a month or so. The idea of her devoured me. Now I can’t imagine why, it’s so thoroughly over.

Joyce flinched; she was shocked; she felt a rich pulse of blood in her heart.

—“Devoured you.”

— You asked me.

— I almost can’t bear that, that the idea of her devoured you.

— It’s men, he tried to explain. This is how it takes us sometimes. I’m so sorry. It seems such a cheap trick, now I’m having to put it into words. I can’t even believe, myself, that it ever seemed important.

— How many times, exactly, precisely, did you make love to her? Don’t lie, whatever you do.

He had to mentally count them, humbled and blushing, and she stared at his eyes as if she might catch in there some flicker of the pictures he summoned up.

— Six? Yes, I think six.

— And was it good? Tell the truth.

— How am I supposed to answer that, to you?

— But answer it.

— At first, it was good. He sighed. Then I got tired of her; she got on my nerves. Don’t think I don’t feel like a swine.

— I don’t want to contain you, Joyce said, after a pause. I don’t want to be your lock and key.

— Sometimes it feels to a man, he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if women want to make the world sweet. Are you going to be angry if I say this? But it’s not sweet. And it’s sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything’s going to be all right, everything’s nice.

— Is this sex we’re talking about here?

— It’s partly sex. Yes, I suppose it is. And freedom, not getting all tangled up in sweet things, being able to slip the rope sometimes.

— Well, I might want that too, she said.

— Might you? He was startled.

— I might. Didn’t that occur to you?

His face was full of trepidation.

— Are we talking about freedom? I don’t know, it’s not the same — freedom — for men and women. Just biologically, even. Say I’d been wrong, last night, about John. I don’t know whether I could deal with that: you, with another man.

— You would just have to, she said. Maybe. If that’s how we’re going to manage things.

— I see. I see what you’re getting at.

She let him hold her by the shoulders, then, gripping tightly.

There was so much more for them to say and to sort out.

But at that moment, like a bird piping, the baby sang out from behind the bars of his cot.

* * *

Needless to say, there was plenty of clearing up left to do. Ray’s idea of a tidy room was not the same as hers. He had done his best, but he had no idea where most things went, or how to deal with the dirty pans, or how to wrap up the things that needed to be stored in the fridge. And he hadn’t been able to use the vacuum in the middle of the night. (Goodness knows what the Underwoods even made of his running the hot water.) She sent Ray back to bed to sleep (“Daddy’s got a bit of a headache”) and set about seeing to all this, as well as preparing the children’s breakfast and getting them dressed and making the beds and rinsing Daniel’s nappies and putting them on to boil; and all with an exultant lightness, nursing a secret and liberating excitement like a teenager who’s been kissed and carries the feel of it around all day on her skin. Every time she had to pass the closed door of the bedroom, she was aware of Ray in there as if he were an adventure that awaited her.