Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

The house stood on reclaimed estuary land, and wide rhines — drainage ditches — covered with bright green algae crisscrossed the fields all round. Ducks and moorhens swam on them, as did the geese who were Ann’s special friends; she stroked their fat creamy necks and kissed them on their beaks. One particularly severe winter they were cut off by snow from Farmouth for a whole week (Uncle Dick eventually got through to them with food and paraffin). Then in the spring when the snow melted, the rhines flooded and the house stood in a shallow lake of water. The children made a boat out of an old tin tub, the one Lil used to wash Kay in front of the kitchen stove.

When Kay wouldn’t go in the “boat,” all the others became bent upon coaxing her into it, as if she were missing something transforming and essential.

— Cowardy custard! said Peter.

— You’ll love it! Martin pleaded. It isn’t dangerous; see how shallow it is? It’s so easy: look! It’s jolly good fun. You can come in with me.

And he executed some nifty turns and splashed up and down, paddling with the spade. Martin was good at all these sorts of things: paddling a boat, climbing trees, clambering (unbeknownst to his mother) along the rafters in the hayloft at their neighbor’s farm, or steering the old pram, which they used as a go-cart, on the causeway that ran down to the shore. Kay pressed her mouth shut and shook her head and clung to the little scrap of grubby blanket that was her “sucky” to get her to sleep, which she took everywhere with her. (“One of these mornings I’m going to drop that in the stove!” Lil said whenever she saw it, so Kay had learned to keep it out of sight, in her pocket or balled up in her hand.)

Peter was — inevitably — the one who tipped out of the tub into the filthy water. He lost his nerve when he drifted slightly away from the house, which stood on a slight rise; they knew they must be careful not to paddle near the rhines, where the water was deep. He raised himself awkwardly to look behind him and then went in with a big splash and a funny truncated scream and had to wade ignominiously back to the others, pulling his boat behind him. He was a strange mixture of genuine ineptness and deliberate clowning. He and Martin had vicious fights; when Peter lost his temper he would pummel Martin blindly and frantically, rolling his eyes up and crying loudly through clenched teeth. Martin said the sight of Peter made him laugh so much he was too weak to fight back.

Joyce was fifteen that spring, really too old to play at boats. It was only because she was small that she could fit in it, with her knees up to her chin. When she was quite a way from the others and their voices were remote, she stopped paddling and leaned cautiously back with the spade resting across the middle of the tub. She had been working all morning (it was a Saturday), learning the dates of the American Revolution, learning lists of French words for birds and trees, getting Peter to test her. She would have her School Certificate exams in a few months. Her head was full of the sound of herself, reciting, repeating.

The sky when she leaned back and looked up was mostly steadily gray, like a dull wool soaking up the light, but over toward the estuary the gray had begun to break up and there was an opened gash of surprising brilliant blue with scraps of milky cloud floating in it. She imagined copying those clouds in paint, noticing how they had a bright hard edge of light against the blue. Then she thought about the art room at Amery-James, which was up a flight of stairs over the dining hall and always seemed restfully separate from the rest of school. Instead of maps and blackboards and piles of somber textbooks, the art room was filled with a clutter of interesting things to look at: vases of dried grasses and seed heads, printed silks and embroideries, a carved wooden mask, a bright yellow kite, a sheep’s skull, huge pottery dishes with coarse bold colors and patterns unlike anything Joyce had ever eaten off in anyone’s home. The room was high and light and airy and the walls were hung with pictures, some beautiful and some queer and incomprehensible. There were a couple of drawings of naked women, too, which Joyce studied with furtive curiosity and which made some of the girls say there was something funny about Miss Leonard, the art teacher.

Joyce heard the others shouting to her and realized she was drifting toward where the rhine ran along the edge of the invisible field, marked out by a line of shrubs poking out of the floodwater. She let herself drift for a few more moments, wondering what would happen if she didn’t act, if she let herself go, drifting on into the faster current in her ridiculous frail boat, perhaps being tipped out into deep water by a surge of turbulence or perhaps being picked up and carried onward, faster and faster until there was no return, toward the estuary and then the sea. There was no real danger, of course. If she’d wanted to, she could have stepped out of the tub and walked back. When she did pick up the spade she paddled with studied insouciance, making strong elegant strokes and not deigning to look behind over her shoulder. She was coming to know she could summon up this power to do things elegantly: not infallibly but often. It was important to know how to carry things off, under the eyes of others: the family or the girls at school. She wanted never to make a fool of herself like her cousin Peter, who had reappeared buttoned up to the neck in his school blazer and was hovering outside the kitchen for a chance to dry his clothes over the stove without his Auntie Lil noticing.

* * *

That summer Aunt Vera often stayed late at school; she was rehearsing the historical pageant she was putting on to mark the Festival of Britain. Ann had to stay too; she had landed the much-coveted part of Mary Queen of Scots. (There was a craze for Mary, and a poem about her all the girls knew by heart and chanted in the lunch break with real tears in their eyes: “So she lived and so she died,/ Scotland’s pawn and Scotland’s pride./ England’s bane and England’s heir,/ Mary, fairest of the fair.”) The School Cert girls weren’t supposed to be involved in the pageant; they had too much else on their minds. Quite often Joyce had to wait at the mission by herself in the afternoons, hoping Uncle Dick would remember she needed a lift. She would try to absorb herself deeply in her homework behind the windows of the little office, never lifting her head when she sensed the sailors coming and going on the other side of the glass, scaldingly aware of herself, bent over her books in her prissy neat school uniform, and of the incitement to resentment or violence the sight of her must represent to these strong thwarted shameless men. When at long last it was Uncle Dick’s tall shape in his dark coat and hat that loomed beyond the window, her heart spilled over with relief. The world readjusted itself back inside the shelter of his importance, his air of always being in a hurry, his loud lofty authority with crazy Mrs. Mellor and with the men. “Men,” when he said it, shrank only to mean something about how they were employed, and set Joyce safely above them, condescending to them and beyond their reach.

One afternoon as they set off in the car, Uncle Dick remembered something he wanted to take back for Vera.

— Just making a little detour, he said to Joyce. We won’t be ten minutes.

He turned the car around and they drove through the streets to where the Authority was building several new houses, including the one for his family. The designs for the houses had been taken from the Ideal Home Show in London: some of them were already finished and lived in, two or three were still under construction. It had not been discussed, not properly, whether there would be room for Lil and her children when Vera got her new house. Joyce thought perhaps her uncle had some news for his wife about it; perhaps it was ready and he had been keeping it for a surprise. But he pulled up to a red brick house which already had curtains up and a striped awning over the door, although the garden was still a mess of clay on either side of the path.