Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

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The doorbell rings and Pearl’s friends arrive. The girls are nice to Zoe; they ask polite, interested questions about her work. Pearl appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in Zoe’s bathrobe with her hair wet; laughing, as if things have already started being funny, she calls to them to come on up. They aren’t dressed to go out yet; they’ve brought carrier bags full of clothes, and they will spend the next couple of hours trying on and borrowing and pluming in front of one another.

Zoe is going out too, to see a late film at the Arts Centre with a friend, but she doesn’t want Pearl to know this. If Pearl realizes the house is empty she will invite a whole gang of people back to her room, and then Zoe will either have to row with them to get them out or lie awake all night listening to their music and laughter and stoned noisy visits to the toilet to pee all over the floor (the boys) or throw up (one of the girls is bulimic).

As they pile upstairs chattering and Zoe is about to close the front door behind them, she sees that the clouds have broken up. The drab working-class terrace (built for the working class, that is, a century ago, and now shared by a whole mix of types and races in these socially more complicated times) is full of a rich thick yellow light. Above the roofs, baroque dramas are being acted out in the sky: dark clouds part, and effulgent pink and orange beams break through like revelations. Windowpanes blaze. A blackbird is singing improbably in the street’s one tree, a little skimpy one planted at a corner and almost defeated by the successive brutal scalpings of local gangs of kids. The blackbird is rather absurdly disproportionate to the amount of tree there is to sit in, like a bird in a child’s picture book. There’s a perfume of garlic and ginger in the air from the Bengali restaurant on the corner.

Zoe is infected by the girls’ Friday-night mood, or the change in the light, or the heedlessness of the kids careering along the pavements on their bikes.

She thinks excitedly that anything could happen.

After the end of the war, when she turned eleven, Joyce Stevenson won a scholarship to Gateshead Grammar; she was one of the top forty children in her year. Two years later, when they moved south to live with her Aunt Vera, her Uncle Dick arranged to have her scholarship transferred to Amery-James High School for Girls, which was in an elegant eighteenth-century house in the city. New classrooms and laboratories and a gym had been added to the old building. The girls and the life there were subtly, complicatedly different from the children and the life Joyce and her sister Ann had known before; this had to do, they quickly understood, with a whole deep mystery of difference between the South and the North, in which their family was peculiarly entangled.

The Amery-James girls had a kind of sheen to them; their hair seemed glossier and their skin had a fresher bloom, their movements were slower and more measured. Joyce and Ann missed the boys and the men teachers. You had to watch your tongue, to hold back on some of the quick smart joking things you might have said in the North, because here what counted for glamour and importance was rather a kind of restraint and a collective know-how, knowing when it was the right season for French-skipping and cat’s cradle, knowing when these things were suddenly childish, knowing how to wear your purse belt so that it didn’t bunch up your skirt around the waist, knowing when to speak and when not to, and how to speak. There were a few girls there who had the city accent, comical and yokel-ish. You did not want, not even by default, to be counted among them. So Joyce and Ann determinedly set about losing the accents they had grown up with, never actually commenting to each other or to anyone on what they were doing, losing them until no trace was left and they no longer sounded like their mother or their aunt and uncle or their left-behind grandparents in the North.

The big old gray house they rented from the Port Authority was eight or so miles outside the city. At first their Uncle Dick drove them every morning in his car into Farmouth, the residential area behind the Docks where he worked, and they caught a bus from there into town. Then their Aunt Vera got a job teaching history at Amery-James. The girls had known, vaguely, that she had been a teacher before she married and had children, but had not imagined this was something you would ever pick up again later. It seemed incongruous (most of the teachers at the school were Miss, not Mrs.) and potentially an embarrassing pitfall, some mistake Aunt Vera had made in reading the signals of what was acceptable and appropriate.

Now Aunt Vera drove them in to school every morning, in the old Austin Seven that Uncle Dick bought her, which usually had to be started with a starting handle (Lil, their mother, sometimes came out and did it for Vera so she wouldn’t get oil on her teaching clothes). They asked to be let out some little distance from the school so they could walk the rest of the way without her. At least because their surnames were different, most of the girls never even connected Mrs. Trower to the Stevensons, and Aunt Vera never spoke to them any differently than to any of the others or gave any sign of their relationship inside school time. In fact, Joyce and Ann found that they could make for themselves a fairly effective separation between the Mrs. Trower who taught them history and Aunt Vera at home, closing off their knowledge of the one when they were dealing with the other. It was a relief that she turned out to be one of those teachers who elicited fear and respect rather than contempt. She was passionate about her subject, but that was tolerated as a kind of occupational hazard, with the same ambivalent tolerance that was extended to the brainy ones among the pupils. What was more important was that she was exacting and strict and could be scathingly sarcastic: Joyce more than once, and not without a certain private familial triumph then, saw her aunt reduce a girl to tears.

In the end-of-year revue they made fun of how, although she knew all the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, the “Trower-pot” never remembered where she’d put down her chalk. Some girl would be chosen to impersonate her who could look tall and imposing and oblivious as she did, and whose hair could be arranged to imitate how hers was always escaping in thick untidy strands from where it was pinned up behind. Joyce would assiduously shut out a picture of Aunt Vera in her dressing gown in the mornings, her worn-out gray-pink corset and brassiere strewn on the bed behind her in a tangle of bedclothes, wailing to Lil at her bedroom door through a mouthful of hairpins that her stocking had a run.

— Hell’s bells, Lil would complain, puffing upstairs with the soap and kneeling to paste it onto the run before it galloped, you only bought them stockings last week.

Her aunt’s impatience with ordinary everyday things was in reality much more complicating and painful than the innocently merry version in the revue. But the idea of the merry version was soothing; for her aunt, Joyce guessed, that journey of transition in the Austin Seven was in itself every morning a liberating shedding of complications and an opportunity to become something more exciting and more charming than was possible at home.

— I’m really so very lucky, teaching at a school like this, she said to them one morning. (They had stopped as usual in the suburban street of brutally pollarded lime trees ten minutes from Amery-James. Fringed blinds blanked out the windows in the big dumb houses.) They think that because you’re female you won’t need any further intellectual stimulation after you’re married. But take it from me, once you’ve been awakened to the life of the mind, you can’t just smother that life and put it to sleep, however inconvenient it might be for some.