Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce came looking for them, carrying two full glasses.

— Time for champagne and toasts! Come on, you two! Don’t go and be so superior that you miss all the fun.

She was wearing a dress she’d made, green Liberty cotton printed with tiny bunches of cherries; her hair was cut in a new layered way that exposed too recklessly, Zoe thought, how the light red was fading underneath into colorlessness and gray. She was always vigilant for glimpses of haggardness and wear under her mother’s petite prettiness. She dreaded that Joyce would try to engage Simon in conversation, imagining she was drawing him out about Cambridge or poetry or “left-wing politics,” as she called them.

— I suppose Simon will find us all awfully loud and boisterous, Joyce said, if he isn’t used to our sort of family occasion. We do tend to let our hair down. His family’s probably much more respectable.

Simon smiled his fending-off smile.

— We’re so respectable I don’t think we even do family occasions. So I won’t be able to tell whether you’re more loud and boisterous than the average.

— We’re very rude. But I don’t care. God knows what the bride’s relatives are making of it all. They seem a bit squaresville, and they’re probably shocked.

— Mum, all right, we’ll come inside.

They stood at the back of the orangery and Simon drank down his champagne before the toasts were made and squinted through his smoke at the guests on the top table who stood up to make speeches, smiling privately to himself but not laughing at the jokes. These jokes were mostly about sex and produced loud shouting laughter and heckling from Peter’s side of the family; the bride’s relatives and the more elderly guests were more subdued. Zoe decided not to even smile.

Peter had put on weight in the last few years. His head, which had been clumsily heavy when he was younger, seemed in proportion now; his thick shoulder-length black hair was speckled with gray and he wore big tinted glasses and a patterned tie. The bride in her youthfulness was insubstantial beside him: pretty enough, blond with blue eyes and an anxious pink rash on her throat and arms. In an accent tinged with Americanisms, Peter made a witty and emotional speech, saying how happy he was at coming home at last to live close to his “beloved mother” (there was a flashed exchange of glances between Joyce and Ann). Zoe had always liked Peter’s extravagant openness, his clowning confessions (she and her family had spent two happy summers at his place in Vermont). Now she prickled uneasily as if he exposed too much. When the speeches were over and everyone was mingling, he embarrassed her by reminiscing nostalgically to Simon about his days at Peterhouse.

The American children of Peter’s first marriage sat gloomily apart: one leggy sixteen-year-old girl and two younger plump pasty sons in bow ties (“They look,” said Joyce disapprovingly, “as if they haven’t been brought up on home-cooked food”). Vera tried to fuss over them, magisterial in a white blouse with a tie neck and a dark skirt whose waistband rode up on her round high stomach, but they looked at her as if she were an eccentric stranger. Although she had talked endlessly about her grandchildren across the Atlantic — how clever they were, what opportunities they had, what a lovely home — in truth she hardly knew them. She gave herself up instead to basking in the attentions of her son. She forgave any number of missed birthdays, scrawled postcards from exotic holidays, and expensive gifts sent as substitutes for visits, when he walked with her around his guests, his arm around her shoulder, almost as if she were his bride. (Meanwhile the actual bride took her uncomfortable turn with her recalcitrant stepchildren.) There had been some talk of inviting Dick to the wedding. His second wife had died of breast cancer and now he was married again to a nurse he had met at the hospital; they were both retired and lived in the country. Peter and his mother were adamant, though, that he was not to be forgiven, even though Joyce and Ann pointed out that the thing he was not to be forgiven for was more or less what Peter was doing to his first wife now.

Ann said she wanted to talk to Simon about John Donne.

— I knew his poems by heart once. I used to recite them in the street.

— Really?

— Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee .… The lying toad. He is, of course, almost certainly weary of her. But then you’re young so you don’t know about that.

Her cream crèpe-de-chine dress was made up to look like something Edwardian, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and rows of tiny buttons up to the elbow and up the side of the high neck. Although she had a round belly and a waddle when she walked, her dainty hands and feet and small sharp face were still pretty as a quick-eyed little creature, a marmoset. Her dark hair was permed into a mass of curls.

— Haven’t you two got anything stronger than tobacco? My kids are driving me berserk. Sophie wanted to be a bridesmaid, can you believe, and is still sulking. I was hoping we could escape to the grotto for a secret smoke. Did you know there was a grotto? It’s supposed to be divine. Now I’m forty, the only chance I get to carry on with beautiful young men is likely to be by stealing them from my niece.

Simon smiled warily.

— A grotto sounds interesting, he said.

Zoe, going in search of more drink, bumped into Ray, looking huntedly around him.

— Is your mother anywhere in sight? D’you think I can get away with a quick cigar? Just one of these little ones?

— She’s with the caterers. You’re probably OK. Why don’t you come and talk to me and Simon?

— Oh, he’s much too stringently intellectual for me.

— Dad, I wish the two of you would get on. He hates this kind of phony occasion just like you do.

— Who says I hate it? I’m having a wonderful time. Our transatlantic cousin is one of my favorite people. Not only that but I’m hoping he’s going to be one of my customers, now he’s moving home. He buys contemporary art, you know. Of course this is hardly the New York market, but at least we’re cheaper. He’ll buy Frisch; he’ll certainly buy Frisch, he’ll love it. Anyway, what’s your friend got to complain about? Free booze, free grub, good music? Why the hell isn’t he enjoying himself?

— Don’t call him that: “my friend.” His name’s Simon.

— It would be. How sure I was that he couldn’t be a Wayne or a Terry. You’ve let me down, Zo. I was counting on you to bring home someone vulgar and unsuitable, just to see the look on your mother’s face. We’ll have to see what Daniel can do. I’m quite hopeful, actually, in that respect. I think the purple hair is a promising sign.

By the time Zoe found a half-full bottle she had lost Simon, and then she spotted him making his way down between two tall hedges in search of the grotto. She had been drinking champagne on an empty stomach and felt dizzy and desperate.

— Do you hate them all? she asked, when she caught up with him.

— Don’t be silly, he said. Don’t exaggerate.

— I know what you think. They all put on such an act. They make such a display of enjoying themselves. It’s all so false and so materialistic.

— You don’t, actually, have any idea what I think.

— My dad’s different. He’s serious about what he does. You do like his paintings? (She had shown him that morning around the ones hung on the walls at home; he hadn’t commented.)

He shrugged.

— No, not much.

This was a hard blow; she had counted on his admiring them, taking them to stand for what was deep and true as everybody else always had. She struggled to smile and keep her composure, but her face was stinging and her eyes were watering as if he’d actually struck her. She was caught out in her own unexamined enthusiasm, exposed and curling up.