Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Fiona wasn’t getting on very well with her mother. Jean had left Brights and was working in a café making greasy breakfasts; she complained that she couldn’t get the smell of frying out of her clothes or her hair. She was still pretty, although she was putting on weight around her waist and her complexion was muddier. She always asked Zoe how she was getting on at school. When Zoe said she was thinking of changing to Langham Road, Jean gave her a sharp look, almost as if she’d seen through with contempt to some effort of Zoe’s to ingratiate herself.

— What would you want to go to that dump for? You should think yourself lucky, at the grammar school.

— She’s a bleeding liability, said Fiona, upstairs in Zoe’s bedroom, tapping an Embassy Regal out of her packet with one hand in a deft habituated movement. Zoe didn’t smoke, out of fear that she’d make a mess of it. Humbly she brought ashtrays. According to Fiona, Jean’s latest boyfriend was “the strong and silent type.”

— So silent, he’s only learned about twenty words, and most of them aren’t very nice. She has to account to him for where she is every moment of the day, or he starts breaking the place up. I can’t wait to get out of there and get somewhere of my own, I honestly can’t.

Zoe registered this grown-up proposition with a lurch of awe: the time for her to leave behind her room in the family house seemed to belong in some era of the remote future.

— What about your dad, she wondered shyly. Have you ever thought about going to stay with him?

— Oh, him. Fiona gave her a look. No, thank you: not unless I wanted to spend my life in a pub and live on fish and chips.

In many ways this was the most intimate period of their relationship. Fiona confided in Zoe as she never had before.

— I want to stay on at school, she said. I want to get good qualifications. I’d like to study languages and be one of those secretaries who work doing translations or stuff. I’m going to go to London, get myself a flat.

They spent some time then going into the details of how they would decorate their flats. Zoe had visited a friend of her mother’s in a tiny mews apartment in central London, painted in white and turquoise, with a table that let down from the wall on a rope and a bathtub in the kitchen that covered with a board to make a work surface. Both of them were entranced by the idea of this. All Fiona’s plans seemed possible to Zoe. Fiona would know how to manage these things — dashing to work on the tube in the mornings, growing perfect nails with half-moon cuticles, shopping for tea for one — as Zoe never would. In elegant midiskirts and black patent leather boots, she would look like the models in the fashion magazines, with their mournful faces full of initiated knowledge.

— And the one thing for certain I don’t want is some cretinous boyfriend glooming around in the background, said Fiona with puritan zeal, and Zoe earnestly agreed.

* * *

The girls were paid to help out sometimes with joyce’s parties. Joyce would work herself into a frenzy of preparation, cleaning and cooking. The house had to look like a dream of its perfect self: the tall light rooms with their floor-length windows, the wrought-iron balcony laden with pots of flowers, huge rice-paper lampshades, walls hung with paintings and drawings and huge tarnished old mirrors in crumbling gilt frames, rough North African blankets and Joyce’s patchwork cushions heaped up together on the low white sofa. The production of the dream was grim sweating effort; Joyce, her hair wrapped in a scarf, rapped out her orders according to a meticulously prepared plan of attack. When the dusting and polishing and vacuuming was done, the food (which she would have been getting ready for days) had to be arranged on the huge pine kitchen table: bowls of tomato and bean salads set out, parsley finely chopped, the home-baked ham sliced, the lemon fridge cake cut, paper napkins layered between all the plates.

Fiona had the right deft touch for all this; Joyce delegated to her and praised her “good design sense.” Zoe was given the easier jobs, like mixing chives in the potato salad, where it didn’t matter if things looked a mess. She asked whether Jean might be invited to the party. Whenever the two mothers met, Joyce was obliviously condescending, and Zoe, watching, saw that Jean kept a private reserve of skeptical dislike behind the awkward appreciative noises at “the lovely house” and “all your artistic things.” She longed to repair this breach.

— I’m not really sure she would fit in, darling, said Joyce doubtfully.

Anyway, Fiona wouldn’t hear of it.

“The party” loomed in anticipation, the capacious repository of hopes and imaginings: anything was possible. There was a joy in being part of the team behind the scenes, working in coordination, haunted by the idea of the crowd that would fill up the expectant spaces. They talked of the guests in tones at once slavishly subordinate and derisory. “They’re bound to put wineglasses down on the polished surfaces.” “What sort of time d’you think we should make coffee? Otherwise they’ll just go on and on drinking.” “Put ashtrays everywhere. Some of them will stub out their cigarettes on the furniture, if they can’t see one.”

Until the last moments, Joyce was demonic, snapping, frantic, possessed by the plan; Ray sulked, disclaiming any involvement in the contemptible female-ordered complexities of socializing with one’s kind. They transformed into their laughing lighthearted social selves at the very stroke of the doorbell announcing the first guests (Zoe and Daniel had for years done clowning imitations of this abrupt about-face). Joyce was suddenly radiant, relaxed, ready for fun, big crescent-shaped pewter and turquoise earrings (to match her turquoise halter-neck top) dangling under her thick red hair that had so many colors in it: pink, red, honey, straw. She glanced offhandedly at the rooms glowing with her labors as if they had arrived in that condition accidentally and somewhat to her surprise. Around Ray’s booming voice, holding forth as he opened bottles, and Joyce’s peals of laughter at someone’s funny story, the party took off.

The girls had to go around filling up glasses; in their giggling retreats to the kitchen for more wine, Zoe explained who people were. Her Aunt Ann was wearing a white Ossie Clark dress with a red rose in her cleavage. Yoyo, an architect, was supposed to be one of Mum’s old boyfriends. Alan Frisch (everybody called him just “Frisch”) was a painter, even weirder than Dad, with bits of straw and stuff stuck onto paint as thick as mud, and Dad was jealous of him. Dud Mason was there with his second wife, very pregnant. The two beautiful young doctors had an “open marriage” and had adopted colored babies. Uncle Martin, Mum’s brother, had brought his latest girlfriend, a Swedish au pair. (Uncle Martin had invented a synthetic fiber that soaked up oil and was trying to sell it to the government to use on spillages from tankers at sea; Mum and Aunt Ann had small prototypes for taking the fat off the top of casseroles.) Dad’s sister Fran had brought the cousins to stay the night, but they were little and had been put to bed.

Later, when everyone had had supper, and all the poised perfection of the house had been sucked down into a vortex of wine and music and smoke and food debris littered everywhere, Zoe and Fiona were probably supposed to go to bed too, but by that time the adults in the house had abdicated all responsibility and no one cared, so they sat side by side on the stairs sharing a bowl of salted peanuts, squeezing apart to make a gap when anyone wanted to go up to the bathroom. They took turns making forays into the lounge, where the party was thickest, pretending to be looking for plates to clear, then reporting back on who was loud, who was happy, who was drunk, who was flirting. Joyce was usually flirting, radiantly and decorously holding off some dedicated man. (“She’s awfull ,” deplored Zoe.) Ray would be at the center of whichever knot of debate and dissent was most intense. (“Jesus Christ,” they heard him shouting. “This is the tragedy of art under the later stages of capitalism. Success is failure. Failure is success.”) The guests had been putting on Jefferson Airplane and the Stones and Dory Previn; now Aunt Ann was dancing to “The Age of Aquarius,” absorbed and solitary, weaving her arms around snakily, unpinning one by one the strands of her thick dark hair from where her hairdresser had pinned them up, and letting them fall onto her bare tanned shoulders. Uncle Cliff (who had just done a deal selling luminous paint to slaughterhouses in Sweden) watched over her through his puffing of cigar smoke from the sofa. He was short and plump, with a sprouting mustache and thick hair that looked like a wig although it wasn’t, and he had driven her to the party in his Jaguar.