Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Visually, he admires the element of theater in the proceedings, especially the British Legion chap who follows the coffin up the aisle carrying the standard. And then there’s his granddaughter, Pearl, who turns up unexpectedly from Oxford: to the delight of Joyce, of course, who’s dotty about her, and in whose eyes she can’t do any wrong. Pearl is dressed preposterously in black from head to foot, her hair is dyed black, even her nails are painted black (as far as he knows, she never actually had anything to do with Dick, beyond bestowing on him one or two of her withering glances on occasion, if something he said offended against the implacable received wisdom of the young).

Joyce whispers loudly in his better ear; probably about how marvelous Pearl looks and that he ought to paint her.

He mumbles something noncommittal.

There are other young people here too (including two of Peter’s sons from his second marriage), all of whom make Ray anxious. He suspects them, to begin with, of hypocrisy. They lean forward to pray when the vicar suggests it, they put their heads in their hands, they close their eyes. What can they know about praying? He doesn’t believe in prayer, he doesn’t do it, but at least he was brought up to know how. None of these teenagers have surely ever been in a church, except at weddings and funerals. Are they engaged in a mocking parody of the mores of older folk? Or, more likely, is there such a moral vacancy in them, the product of an era of addiction to quick fixes and instant gratifications, that they will like unconsidering infants join in whatever new game offers itself?

In fact, if he looks around him, they’re all at it, all his family, all the generations, drooping their heads, closing their eyes: even Martin, who only believes in the Periodic Table and his latest invention, even his niece Sophie’s partner Joe, who was surely once in the Socialist Workers’ Party. (Daniel isn’t here; he is in Italy on business, which takes priority of course.) Some of them have even knelt down on those little stuffed square things; what are they, cassocks? hassocks? Joyce kneels. (He is filled with his customary mix of feelings in relation to her public behavior: tender solicitude and exasperation at once. Her knees will hurt. What is she playing at?) Ray knows full well that none of them ever pray, from one year to the next, under ordinary circumstances. What words can possibly be going through all their minds at such a moment? Peter’s droop is of course displayed more conspicuously than anyone else’s; his forehead is pressed against the cuff of his Armani suit as though he struggles with ultimate reckonings.

At least Ray can count on Zoe. She sits bolt upright, like him, with her eyes open. A warmth strikes up in Ray’s chest at the thought of the painting he is doing of Zoe; he is filled with such sudden hopefulness and excitement he forgets where he is. The parts of the painting that have already worked, and the parts that he does not yet know how to resolve, move him to equal enthusiasm. (It is only when he enters the studio and takes up his brushes that the dread of failing and the burdensome labor involved in bringing the thing rightly to its completion will begin to gnaw at him again.) He hasn’t painted Zoe since she was a child. In the new painting she is sitting tensely forward, frowning as if she is seeking out something. He is using a lot of cobalt blue, unusual for him, not a color he has felt much in sympathy with before; he is using it boldly, making marks that are deliberately effortful and dry, painted against the resistance of the canvas. He can’t easily express it in words, but he knows what he means by this. The blue adds in the trace of an aura of effort and dedication that seems to him to surround Zoe. He has her wrapping one leg around the other, hugging herself tightly with her shoulders hunched. She always looks as if she hasn’t slept enough, as if she’s feeling the cold.

While she sits for him she has been telling him (before he went deaf) about three of her students who are in Israel at the moment, operating as part of the International Solidarity Movement on the West Bank: riding in ambulances through the checkpoints to shame the soldiers into letting through the sick and women in labor; assisting those Palestinians whose trees are out of bounds on the edge of Israeli settlements in harvesting their olives; helping to coordinate a linkup one Saturday between Palestinian protesters from Bethlehem and Israeli protesters from Jerusalem. Others work in community conflict resolution in Kosovo and AIDS clinics in Uganda. It seems to Ray extraordinary, beyond hoping for, that such people exist; that the British students and the Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators and all the others should be willing to sacrifice safety and comfort and private pleasure in the service of some cause they believe in. The thought of it, a few days ago, filled his eyes unexpectedly with tears, which he had to wipe away with the dirty sleeve of the old jacket he wears to paint in. What Zoe does, he knows he is not capable of: sitting through meetings, marching, getting up petitions against war with Iraq, shaking collecting boxes in town. She puts up in her spare room all sorts of stray visitors and contacts from that other world of conflict and deprivation, come to campaign or raise money or give talks. The idea of these small sacrifices fills Ray with ennui even as it pricks at his bad conscience.

He helps Joyce to return to a sitting position; she shoots him an annoyed look, determined to manage by herself. Then the palaver is at an end and the undertakers carry the coffin out; the organ bleats and rambles, there is a shuffling of shoes and hymnbooks in the echoing space, a rumble of throat-clearing and subdued relieved voices as the congregation resume their everyday selves. (Not a bad turnout. And, judging by the things people stop to say to Joyce — Ray gets the amplifier out, twiddles with the knobs — a number of them are under the delusion that Dick was a charming old gentleman with a generous heart.) He and Joyce, Peter and Rose, Ann and Cliff, and Martin and Ingrid will all follow the coffin to the crematorium. Zoe will hurry over to the flat where Joyce has put food and drink out for whoever comes back to drown their sorrows. Sophie will go to pick up Vera, who wouldn’t come to the service (she didn’t want to sit there under false pretenses, she said; they weren’t sure if she meant her relationship to Dick or her irreligion). Joyce always has these occasions so well organized.

* * *

Joyce and ray have been in their new flat for eighteen months. They have the ground floor, the first floor, and the garden of an elegant early Victorian terrace high up in Hilltop (the flats above have separate entrances). There are fine views over the sprawling city: the Georgian terraces strung like precious old necklaces round the hills, the tall glass office blocks, the disused city docks with their warehouses converted into art centers and café bars and riverside apartments. Joyce has had major work to do: she made the kitchen into a studio for Ray and knocked a bedroom and a bathroom together to make a new kitchen on the first floor; then she took out a partition wall at the side of the staircase, restoring the entrance hall to its original proportions, uncovered the old stone flagged floor, and hung the walls all round with paintings and drawings. Of course she and Ray don’t actually do any of this work themselves these days; they have lived in an occasionally taxing intimacy for months with Dean and Alan the builders and Terry the carpenter.

Joyce snatches a moment while they leave their coats on the bed to show Ann the latest improvement: a third bathroom opening off the master bedroom. Ann (who is doing things to her house too) is almost as interested in all this as Joyce is. They talk about tilers, soil pipes, grouting, and a firm Ann knows of who will renovate old parquet floors. Joyce demonstrates the usefulness of the built-in wardrobes, where their clothes hang in ordered spaces and their shoes are set out in pairs.