Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

This sounded like something she had been preparing to say to them: a message for Joyce, probably, rather than for Ann; Ann didn’t bother to work hard enough to get top marks. And perhaps partly because they were already in the territory in which she was the Trower-pot and must be taken notice of by the clever girls, Joyce did obediently think about her aunt’s good luck that made it possible to step out of the mess of everyday life. Her own mother Lil, who’d never been to grammar school, certainly hadn’t had that luck, and Joyce didn’t want to be powerless like her.

After the car with all its important fuss had turned the corner and the girls began walking down the leafy cut-through, Ann launched into an imitation of her aunt that was much more cruel than the one in the end-of-year revue. Ann was almost as tall as Joyce, although she was two years younger, and she had dark curling hair which made perfect ringlets when Lil put it in rags at night. Joyce was small; her hair was straight and a pale sandy red she hated. Ann wore her green coat swaggeringly with its collar up; her school hat had a permanent ridge from front to back where she shoved it out of sight into her satchel at any opportunity.

She pretended to be Uncle Dick in his courting days.

—“Go on, gi’ us a kiss, hin.” “Oh, no, I couldna do that. I’m awakening the life of the mind, you unappreciative man. I won’t be needing any further stimulation.”

— You’re a horrible little beast, said Joyce, scalded with her usual feeling of impotent indignation at her cocky little sister.

Ann crossed her eyes.

— The life of the mind, she said, in broad Tyneside. You mustn’t let it go too far.

* * *

Uncle Dick was handsome. He was tall, with black hair slicked back with scented dressing and high cheekbones and remote-seeming eyes, like a Red Indian in a film. He was kinder, Joyce noticed, to her and Ann and Martin than he was to his own children; he was disappointed with his son, Peter, for being a crybaby. But mostly he was so distracted and unaware of all the children that, in the mornings when he used to give them a lift into Farmouth, they had shyly (even Ann was shy of him) to remind him to drop them off at the bus stop. If they missed the bus, though, he would suddenly seem to wake up to where he was and race to overtake it, sounding his horn and leaning out his window. But you had to wait for him to start off those kind of excitements; if you tried to be funny when he wasn’t thinking about it, he’d snap out at you.

They understood that he must have his thoughts on his job as Chief of the Docks Police, which gave him authority over the huge vessels unloading their cargoes, and the trains “Hallen” and “Port-bury” in the sidings, and the ships’ officers and the rough frightening men, the sailors and the dockers. There were new electric cranes to lift off the bales of tobacco and barrels of sherry and the imported cars (and once — he took the boys down especially to see it — four helicopters from the U.S.A.); but you still saw the dockers running down the gangplanks of the ships with long pieces of timber on their shoulders. If the children came home from school on the bus, they were supposed to wait for their uncle in the Seamen’s Mission just outside the big locked dock gates. This was run by a mad old woman called Mrs. Mellor, who told Joyce and Ann that you could catch a baby from using a public toilet: “Something could jump up inside you.” If it wasn’t raining they preferred to wait outside the mission on the pavement, even at the risk of having incomprehensible sinister things said to them by the men going by. The Dutch sailors were the worst. The children learned to smile politely and avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.

Joyce’s own father had been killed at Dunkirk when she was five and Ann was three and Martin just a baby. Their mother had a bottle filled with stones from the beach where he’d died: she’d gone to visit it with his parents after the war was over. Joyce could remember her father existing, and some things about what he looked like (he had pale ginger hair like hers), but she couldn’t actually remember anything he did or how the days were different when he was in them. They had come down to live with her Aunt Vera partly thinking that their Uncle Dick might take up a father’s place in their lives. Lil had said it would be good for them all to have a man around. To the children’s relief, he didn’t seem to be around all that much. He did a lot of driving backward and forward along the two miles between their house and the docks, and he was sometimes at the house for supper; but he almost always had to go back to the office in the evenings. Joyce knew when she saw into Aunt Vera’s room in the mornings that he hadn’t slept there, although his suits still hung in the wardrobe and there were things of his — a hairbrush and cufflinks and collar studs — on the dressing table that stood with its back against the window. A series of framed colored prints cut out from a Lilliput magazine hung around the bedroom walls: slim girls dressed only in diaphanous veils swinging round Greek pillars or gazing at their reflections in a lake. When Uncle Dick was in there once, getting a pair of shoes out from the wardrobe to take back in to the docks, he told Joyce they were all his old girlfriends. She thought it was funny, but she didn’t repeat the joke to Vera.

* * *

So what happened instead of their getting a new father was that Aunt Vera got a job and went out to work every morning as if she were the man of the house, and their mother Lil stayed at home like the wife and looked after Kay, Vera’s daughter, who didn’t go to school yet. Lil cleaned the house, washed the clothes, looked after the hens and geese, grew vegetables in the garden, and bought food from the delivery vans. Supper was ready when they all came home; the good table (they had to use the good table, it was the only one big enough for them all) would be laid with a blanket under the oilcloth to protect it; the kitchen would be dense with steam from the pans bubbling on the temperamental old paraffin stove, which sometimes went wrong and gave out clouds of black smoke as well.

Lil didn’t look anything like her sister; she was short and soft and plump, with short dark hair that was always dropping out of its home perm. She knitted whenever her hands weren’t busy with something else, one long needle tucked steady under her arm, the other one flickering in and out of the stitches; when the work dragged on the needles, she rubbed them in her hair to make them slip. She smoked, although Vera said it was common; when she hugged the children the tang of cigarettes and the hard outline of the packet of Woodbines in her apron pocket were part of her safe consoling flavor. Day after day, “out in the back of beyond” as she put it, she didn’t bother to change her shapeless print dress. Sometimes Joyce couldn’t help seeing her mother through Aunt Vera’s eyes. Lil didn’t read books, she wasn’t interested in the news or talk programs on the wireless; she liked the dance bands and sang “O for the Wings of a Dove” while she did the housework. She was quite incapable of that effort of self-transformation by which Vera and the girls pulled themselves up every morning to be smart and knowing and braced for Amery-James.

Sometimes Vera and Lil quarreled. The worst quarrel was something to do with Ivor, Joyce’s father. Lil had had a letter from one of his senior officers describing how he’d died bravely, fired on from a strafing airplane while he was trying to help a wounded comrade in the water. This version of events had become a kind of family piety for the Stevensons, a poignant high truth. Vera was scornful of Lil for believing in that “nonsense.”