Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

— Don’t you think they write the same stuff for every gullible widow? It’s the final insult, sending out these sugar-plum stories nobody in their right mind believes in.

— You always have to know better, don’t you? said Lil passionately. Why can’t you just take someone else’s word for it for once?

— Oh, Lillie! Vera seemed puzzled by the vehemence of her sister’s reaction. I’m not insulting Ivor, I’m honoring his memory. But I won’t swallow that old rubbish about honor and glory.

— Old rubbish! said Lil. You think you can get away with saying anything to me. But there are people you wouldn’t dare say that in front of.

— Do you want a third world war? said Vera. Do you want our sons to die in the next war, because we’ve all swallowed up what we’ve been told like good little children?

Joyce couldn’t stop herself wondering what it had been like for her father to die, if it hadn’t been high-toned and beautifully sad. When she tested out the two possibilities in her mind she knew intuitively that what was hard and ugly was more likely to be true. And although Aunt Vera could be hateful, with her loud superior voice and her bruising definiteness, Joyce thought that in such a contest it would be safer to be bruising than bruised. She wished she were tall and statuesque like her aunt; she began to adopt some of her mannerisms, her lofty absentmindedness, her tone of superior skepticism toward everyday housework, her passionate responsiveness to the idea of philosophy or classical music. There wasn’t actually all that much room for philosophy or classical music in Aunt Vera’s life, but the idea of them was woven into her conversation like a wafted promise of a superior way of being. Joyce worked hard, poring over her schoolbooks, hoping that if she could somehow master these mountains of facts and processes she might at last penetrate through to being adult and powerful.

She did very well at school. Her aunt was proud of her. Her uncle brought her home a four-volume set of American encyclopedias called Worldwide Knowledge. Lil was overcome and admiring.

— You ought to be grateful to your uncle, she said. Imagine him taking the trouble to find these for you.

— Something somebody’s given him off one of the ships, her aunt said skeptically.

* * *

The other serious quarrel the sisters had was not unconnected to the one about the war. One of the few times Lil ever took the trouble to dress up was when she went out to séances with a woman in Farmouth who was a medium. Then she put on her navy suit smelling of mothballs and her navy hat with the duck wing and her white gloves and sat looking unfamiliar and important in the car next to Uncle Dick, who gave her a lift to the house where the medium lived. Joyce and Ann begged to be allowed to go too — they were mad at that time for Ouija boards and levitation at Amery-James — but Lil was dignified and immovable in her refusal.

— It’s not a game, she said. It’s not for children.

Vera’s anger at her was out of all proportion, as Uncle Dick pointed out.

— It’s a bit of harmless excitement, he said. Poor old Lillie, she doesn’t get out much.

— There are so many other worthwhile things she could get involved in. I don’t want her to be stultified out here. There are gardening clubs — she’s supposed to care about that — there’s the choir, the Women’s Cooperative Guild. But to lay yourself open to these charlatans, preying upon the weaknesses of the foolish, pulling muslin out from their stomachs and squeezing jellies in people’s hands and pretending to make contact with people who no longer exist, who have turned back into molecules of carbon!

Vera never failed to mention that during the war Lil had been vaguely involved with something called the Magic Battle of Britain: they put up Cross of Light posters in the London underground and threw “go-away powder” into the sea, where it was supposed to mix with the salt to stop the forces of darkness from invading.

— I don’t know what we even bothered with soldiers for, Vera said. Or artillery, or airplanes. All we needed was some old go-away powder. It was that simple. Just like the Queen of the Zulus believing she could make people proof against the white man’s bullets.

In fact, what Lil reported back from her séances never seemed to involve the kind of dramas with ectoplasm and babies’ hands that Vera feared and the children rather hoped for. Her stories were decorous and poignant; it was possible that she censored them for Vera’s benefit. In the lamplight in the kitchen, once she had eased her feet out of her shoes and unhooked her corset, she told them about the sailor husband who had given his blessing to a second marriage, and the woman who had gone into a trance and imagined her dead father taking her into a lovely garden full of the scents of flowers in the darkness. When the woman said how she wished she could see it in the light, her father replied that if she saw it in the light she’d never want to go back.

Lil never seemed to make any very satisfactory contact with Ivor. Sometimes he came near, the medium said, he was trying to reach through, but he was naturally shy, he gave way to the others, he didn’t like to push himself forward.

— I said, That’s him! Lil told them. That’s Ivor. That’s him all over. Trust him.

And so that was how Joyce came to imagine him losing his life on the beach at Dunkirk: holding back shyly, giving way to others.

* * *

Joyce was the eldest of the children. Peter, her cousin, clever and awkward, had a Choral Scholarship at the Cathedral School; he was the same age as Ann. Martin, her brother, was younger and went to the local Juniors in Farmouth. Martin was brown and wiry, gallant and handsome; Lil said she caused him more trouble than all the rest put together. He came home with his school cap pulled hard down to hide a deep gash in his forehead from when he’d been playing about with the tools in a car mechanic’s workshop near school; Lil had to soak the cap where it had stuck to the wound as the blood dried. He didn’t cry. He burned up a pair of trousers in the bedroom grate and told his mother he’d lost them so she wouldn’t see how badly they were ripped; she found the telltale scorched buttons. He made a parachute from his bedsheet and jumped with it out of an upstairs window and somehow only sprained his ankle. His teachers warned that he wouldn’t get a place at a good school. Kay was the baby, who was just growing out of being everyone’s little pet into a silent, stubborn, and stolid child, tall like her mother, with Vera’s large long face, and with a head of startling white-blond hair, which Lil cut in a short bob.

Dick and Vera were waiting for one of the new houses that were being built in Farmouth; in the meantime they were given the old gray house because the Port Authority had bought it up and wasn’t using it. It had long stone mullioned windows with leaded panes; inside the rooms were higgledy-piggledy and unexpected, with low doorways and crooked passages. A narrow spiral staircase behind the kitchen led up to a mysterious tiny room with stone shelves all round where they stored apples; in summer Joyce used to read there. There was a walled kitchen garden, and outside the back door of the house were a walnut tree and a huge William pear tree: fat pears smashed onto the path, and in the autumn mornings when they first opened the back door, Winnie, their brindled bulldog, would push past them and dash out to gobble them up. They found a bat in the living room, its ears as long as its body (Ann put on gloves and carried it outdoors); once a solemn-staring owl was on the sill by an open window in one of the bedrooms. The bathroom was on the ground floor, and the bath had to be filled with buckets of hot water from the stove; outside the window the weeds grew tall and green and were all they needed for a curtain, until Joyce began to imagine she could hear rustlings and made Lil pin up an old blanket when it was her turn.