Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— You don’t want to know that they exist, she says. Little wizened no-sex creatures batting back and forward in their chairs screaming for Mummy. One crawling on the floor around my feet.

And now instead, thank goodness, release. (Though there’s still Vera.)

Joyce phones Peter. This will mean extra sessions with his therapist. There have been reconciliations of sorts, Peter has visited his father once or twice a year for the last few years; he will have his share of the inheritance. Joyce and Ann get their share too; Dick has said often (he was prone to waxing sentimental in his declining years) that they have been better than daughters to him. (“Bloody right we have,” says Ann.) Even Martin gets something.

Joyce drives round to tell Vera the news. Vera has settled years ago for an air of triumphant righteousness at having outlived Dick’s second and third wives (breast cancer and a car accident). She and Dick have often met at Joyce’s, on Sundays and on all the festivals, where they have been as irritable and familiar with each other as any old married couple.

— I’d spoken to him only a few hours before they rang me, Joyce says. I’d arranged for him to come for lunch on Sunday.

She doesn’t tell Vera that Dick had said he should be able to come, as long as he could clock off in time, and that he would be in plain clothes. This is not so much in order to spare Vera from the details of her once-husband’s deterioration as because Vera suffers herself from lapses of consequence, and if they set each other off a discussion can spiral quickly into dizzy realms of unmeaning. (At Christmas Joyce’s grandchildren were both uncomfortable and giggly when Uncle Dick kept exclaiming “Ah so!” as if he was imitating a Japanese soldier, and Vera loudly protested against his using the word “arsehole.”)

Vera doesn’t seem terribly affected by the news.

She is wearing a new pale pink cashmere cardigan Peter has sent her. Joyce did not think the color was a good idea, because of spills (no doubt she will end up handwashing it); but it does look pretty with Vera’s dark skin and iron-gray hair (Joyce and Ann are whiter now than Vera is). In extreme old age a new kind of prettiness is possible, nothing like the youthful one that Joyce still clings to, yearns after; it has to do with the beauty you can find in old twisted wood and patiently eroded stone.

— What about the gales? Vera says. Did you hear them?

The gales are real. Joyce lay awake last night, unwillingly absorbed in listening to them while Ray snored beside her. She doesn’t mind thunderstorms, and she loves to fall asleep to the sound of rain, but she hates the buffeting of strong wind; it agitates her strangely, makes her body ache, makes her want to cry. Also, she was worrying about the garden wall at the back, which was tottery and needed repointing. If the wind blew it down, they would be able to have it repaired on the insurance. On the other hand, if it fell down while someone was passing in the lane that ran behind and someone was hurt, it would be their fault; she would never be able to forgive herself. So she lay tensely, listening for footsteps in the lane. When she tried to wake Ray up to go down and see if the wall was in danger, see if he could push it over anyway — it would be better if it was just down; then she could sleep — he snapped at her crossly that she was being unreasonable.

— Some big branches have come down off the trees on the heath, Vera says. They’ve taped a lot of areas off from the public, for safety. You know that crooked Monterey pine that grows over the path, so that they’ve built a wooden support under it? Well, the tree’s fine, but the support’s down; it’s broken in several pieces. Isn’t that an irony? The tree stands, but the support is broken.

— How d’you know all this? Joyce asks suspiciously. Vera hasn’t been up to the heath for months. (Joyce really ought to take her, to see the daffodils.)

— One of the girls told me: Pammy, Polly, one of those. She cycles into work that way.

— Penny. The one with the short dark hair.

— Whichever. I don’t know, I can’t keep track, they come and go so often.

(Actually, Penny has been working there for at least eighteen months.)

— Ann and I will have to arrange the funeral. I suppose we’ll have some sort of do afterward, at our place. Peter can stay with us. I wonder if he’ll want to bring any of the children?

— Typical of Dick to go like that. Vera chuckles.

— Like what? (Peacefully in his sleep: typical to have it easy at the end?)

— With all that banging about, says Vera. All that wind and bother. Making such a to-do. Slamming on the windows, battering at the doors, howling away.

Joyce chooses to interpret this as a metaphorical association of ideas.

— Yes, isn’t it typical? She laughs. Never one to manage things quietly.

Probably, though, Aunt Vera has really got them muddled up, her husband’s passing and last night’s disturbance, as if what happens inside human lives is leaking out in her imagination into the texture of impersonal real things.

* * *

The funeral goes off all right if you approve of that sort of carrying on.

Ray doesn’t.

Partly, he’s thinking that it won’t be long before it’s him up there in the box while everyone snuffles over him (he is seventy-three: Frisch, the only friend whose work he was genuinely jealous of, died recently). Life is so familiar. You get so used to it, you can’t easily be reconciled with the idea that it won’t muddle on forever.

Also, he didn’t like Uncle Dick and never understood why it was that such a significant proportion of his and Joyce’s time was taken up with worrying over and tending to an old man who had after all acted all his life with abominable selfishness. Dick had never, in all the years since he sent Ray an extraordinary letter of so-called “advice” when he and Joyce first got together, been able to resist an opportunity of telling Ray how to manage everything in his life better. (That is, more like the way Dick managed it.) He once even tried to suggest to him, with what he probably imagined to be tactful persuasion, that he should take up painting watercolors of naval battles.

Also, on all these occasions (weddings included: weddings especially), Ray can’t help a sense of outrage at finding himself under the roof of practicing Christians, not only mingling in their company (he’s a tolerant man) but actually participating, however passively, in their rituals. He thinks of religion as a leftover from the Middle Ages; when he was young he fully expected to see an end to all their mumbo jumbo in his lifetime, and the churches turned into museums and art galleries. It was absolutely in character that Dick converted conveniently to a kind of turn-the-other-cheek Christianity as the end drew nigh (marginally worse, Ray thought, than the Masons, who at least don’t sanctimoniously confess to all their sins on social occasions).

Dick had recently had a bitter falling out with the new vicar over a point of church tradition to do with the hymn for those in peril on the sea. Presumably, however, the vicar (a bleached and fastidious little man, with cold eyes) says today all the right appeasing things for the girls to have a weep over. Ray can’t hear him anyway; he has been afflicted for several days now with a sudden deafness, which the doctor assures him unconvincingly is catarrh blocking his inner ear and will only be temporary. He discovered some sort of deaf aid — a little amplifier — in Dick’s drawer while they were going through his things at the home, and he has been using that, but he doesn’t bother to turn it on for the vicar. It only works for a few minutes at a time and then produces shrill feedback, at which point he usually drops it. He doesn’t care what the vicar has to say anyway. And Joyce doesn’t like him using the amplifier, although she thinks he doesn’t know it. She’d rather he were stone deaf than fumbling about with a hearing aid, giving himself away as an old man.