Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

The children didn’t go to school. They spent the rest of the day at Zoe’s Aunt Ann’s; she had married a man in import and export and lived in an expensive flat in Hilltop with baby cousins that Zoe loved to play mother to. Cliff looked after them all while Joyce and Ann went to the hospital to get Lil’s things. Then they came back and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and crying and making arrangements, talking on the telephone to Aunt Vera, who called from the school, worrying about Martin, who had refused to get out of bed that morning. Joyce had brought him home from the hospital last night; she hadn’t wanted him to go back to the flat on his own.

— There’s nothing left for me to do then, is there? he had said when she woke him up to tell him the news.

Since he had failed to finish his doctorate, he had been spending his days inventing things and building remote-controlled toys for the children instead.

Zoe fussed busily over baby Sophie, changing her bootees and woolly coat, filling her pacifier with rose-hip syrup, piling cushions so she could sit tilted crazily but gamely to one side in her playpen heaped with educational toys. (Joyce and Ray made fun of all the fashionable baby paraphernalia Ann had bought.) She worked perhaps even tiresomely (she felt it herself), playing peep-bo and pat-a-cake, to get Sophie to crack into huge toothless smiles for her, as if the smiles might constitute some kind of proof against disaster. When Ann took Sophie to the clinic to be weighed and to pick up her orange juice, Zoe went along. Somehow her aunt’s unhappiness seemed more approachable than her own mother’s, which she dared not even directly contemplate, because the fabric of the world required her mother to be believing and hopeful.

— At least, she said to Ann (who wheeled the pram rather fast into the wind, so that Zoe had to skip along beside her to keep up), at least you’ve got it over with now. I mean, you won’t have to dread its happening anymore. (Zoe had used this consolation to support herself through visits to the dentist or the breakage of favorite ornaments.)

Ann turned on her a bleak blank face.

— But it’s not fair, she said in fury. Just when she was coming up to her retirement. It’s so unfair!

Zoe skipped on beside the pram in silence, trying not to come anywhere near the real thought of beloved Grandma Lil lost to her, wrestled somehow obscenely away out of existence. Underneath all the protective wadding of kindness and reassurance that it was the business of adults to surround you with, there lurked this lethal truth, dangerous as a naked wire that you might at any time put your hand on by mistake.

After Grandma Lil’s funeral the family went back to Ann’s, where the children were waiting for them with Uncle Cliff. Zoe imagined that a cold wind from wherever they had been was clinging to the adults’ somber clothes. The women’s faces were framed in wet head scarves; a jumble of umbrellas leaked across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. Aunt Vera said loudly to several people that when it was her turn she didn’t care if they buried her in a cardboard box. An Auntie Selina had come down from the North, shepherding a man Zoe supposed must be her husband; Selina looked so like Lil — small and stout with rich brown eyes and hair and a tilting nose — that it was obvious every time Joyce caught sight of her she felt the shock of a hopeless hope. Selina wasn’t quite like Lil, though; she stared more pointedly around her like a sharp brown bird, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t spill over with news, she didn’t have Lil’s way of subsiding comfortably into the corner of a chair, managing glass and fag together in one hand. The man with her sat very upright and still on Ann’s beige leather sofa, his feet in giant shoes placed tidily together on the shag carpet, his brown creased skin stretched tight on his long bony head, his white hair so fine and light it wafted in the movements of air when anyone passed. Ann held his hand and called him Gilly and seemed extravagantly moved to see him; Zoe crept close to listen to his voice. She had thought this way of talking was special to her Grandma Lil (Vera sounded something like it); now she was discovering a whole tribe of relatives who made the same warm kind sounds. Uncle Gilly didn’t say much; mostly he was shyly refusing the food Ann pressed upon him.

— Go on, Gilbert, you may as well take something, it’s all very nice, Selina encouraged, busy with her plate. He’s only put off if he thinks it’s foreign food. You’d think he’d have got used to it in New Zealand.

Gilbert said softly that he didn’t mind if he had a piece of ham.

— Gilbert was Lil’s little favorite when he was a baby, Selina said. (So perhaps he was not her husband.) Isn’t that right, Vera? He used to call her Nolly. When she was in service and coming home on her day off, Mam would stand him on a chair at the window in the front room to look out for her, and he would start calling out “Nolly, Nolly,” before she even turned the corner of the street. You could put the kettle on when you heard him. She sewed him a little pageboy outfit to wear at her wedding. D’you remember that, Gilbert? D’you remember being a page boy?

— No, said Gilbert, smiling apologetically, shaking his head so that his white hair floated, starting to cut his ham into neat small pieces.

* * *

Zoe and fiona went to different secondary schools. zoe, along with Barbara and Pam and Neil Ashley and David Tew and a couple of others, sat the examination for free places to the Direct Grant schools. This little gang of clever ones had been marked apart from the rest of the junior school class almost since anyone could remember, given extra bits of work and spoken to differently. They carried the teachers’ aspirations, fulfilled their longings for tests and triumphs. The other children — Gary Lyons, Paul Andrews, June Fitch — were threatened that they would “end up at” Langham Road, which was the local comprehensive school, “if they carried on the way they were” (and they did indeed end up there, probably regardless of whether they had carried on or not).

It was never seriously suggested that Fiona might sit the examination and get a free place too. Everyone knew, Joyce said at home, that even the free places could be expensive enough once you had paid for the uniform, books, hockey boots, and tennis rackets. Children from poor “backgrounds” would find it difficult to “keep up” with the others (“background” was the euphemism then, conjuring an image of the tragic individual spotlighted against murky, indistinct tenements and slums). Fiona smiled and shrugged and said she didn’t fancy it, as if she put rather a low value on anything the Direct Grant schools could have to teach her, and saw alternative and more intriguing initiations ahead at Langham Road. Their separation seemed to Zoe a fitting and even a poetic thing; it kept her feelings for Fiona twisting poignantly in her heart. She thought of Amery-James, the all-girls school where she duly got her free place, as somehow belonging in her world of the subtle past, and Langham Road as modern and brash and present. At this threshold she felt as if she were submitting to a sacrificial destiny. Zoe’s mother and her Aunt Ann had also been to Amery-James, and her Great-aunt Vera had taught there for half a lifetime (she retired the year before Zoe started). She was taking up a place sanctified by tradition. It helped that the school was in an old eighteenth-century house with an oak staircase and stone-flagged floors, and that they had to buy her uniform in an old-fashioned department store on Clore Hill, where bills and payment and change were whisked around a system of pneumatic pipes to and from a glassed-in counting office. (The store was so expensive they couldn’t get everything they had meant to, and Joyce had to buy some of it later from the secondhand cupboard at the school.)