Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— Ray thinks it’s grotesquely extravagant, she says, but I want to replace the bedroom windows with new identical ones, because these rattle in the wind and keep me awake, and I can have them done in that new burglar-proof glass we’ve already got on the ground floor. He says I’m paranoid.

Ann attacks Ray’s lack of imagination (she is always in favor of the spending of money). Joyce shows her the loose cover she is making for an armchair, matching the curtains. They would like to linger — there is always more to show and to discuss — but they feel themselves claimed by the murmur of their guests from the next room, their sociability dampened by respect for the occasion. There are some ancient old folk — friends from the church, Dick’s sergeant from the Docks police — who must be put in the comfortable chairs and must not be left without refreshments or without anyone to talk to. The vicar will need buttering up; they wondered why he wanted to come back at all, but it turns out he is an amateur watercolorist and means to bother Ray, which is bound to end badly.

— When are our children going to start looking after us, instead? Ann wails to Joyce. Aren’t we old and frail enough?

Ann these days still has her pretty fine-boned face and wrists and ankles, but in between her body has expanded extravagantly. She is using a cane to walk after a fall a few weeks ago (the pressure on those delicate ankles is too much). They visit the kitchen, where Zoe has forgotten to take off the foil and cling film from the plates of food; no wonder no one has started eating. Ann made one of her fruitcakes; Joyce, as well as sandwiches, has made little patties with lemon and cream cheese filling.

— I did Mum’s proper pastry. The one where you roll it out and dab on bits of fat and then fold and roll twice. Zoe was supposed to put the oven on to warm these up.

— Life’s too short for dabbing on bits of fat. I use frozen.

— Vera always notices. She always makes some remark about how you can hardly tell the difference, even when I haven’t mentioned it.

* * *

Pearl is in the garden with her cousin leo, peter’s son. they haven’t seen each other for at least two years; this seems so long ago that they feel almost like strangers. They were surely children in that past where they last met; now they both believe they are grown up. He has grown skinny and tall, with dead-straight hair that falls over his eyes, a nervy eagerness that makes her wonder if he’s speeding, and a slight lisp. They are not really cousins; they bicker amiably over just what their relationship is (his grandmother is her great-grandmother’s sister). They have escaped out here to share a joint; Leo has a little packet of skunk in his pocket. (Granny’s cool, Pearl explains, but Grampy’s funny about that stuff.) There is some evidence of last week’s gales; crocuses and daffodils are flattened in the grass, and buds torn off an old blackened dwarf apple tree are silted up on the mossy path. It is cold, but the sun is shining and the sky is clear, pale blue flooding with pink as the afternoon grows late. Far below them they can see the streams of the city’s traffic flow and part and join up again. Buildings are pastel-colored in the light, like cake icing.

— D’you ever get this weird sensation? Pearl asks him, where you don’t believe that anything is real?

There is surprising delicate skill in Leo’s big blunt finger ends, crumbling tobacco, shredding the weed with his nail. He has to shake the hair back from his face before he runs his tongue along the edge of the Rizlas.

— Last night, she goes on, in my old bedroom at my mum’s, I lay there thinking: Why was I me, instead of someone else. You know?

With the joint wagging unlit in his mouth, he pinches the flesh at the top of her arm between his finger and thumb.

— You’re real, he says. You’re you. It hurts, doesn’t it?

— Ow. But why is now real, and not a few minutes ago before you pinched me? Or before Uncle Dick was dead, say? What makes now the only moment that’s real at one time?

— You should be a philosopher.

— Sometimes, she says, I do feel there’s a whole world of real things out there, only I can’t get through to them. I’m stuck in the pretend ones.

— It’s funny to think, he says, that in ten years’ time we’ll both be what we’re going to be.

— I’ll have been traveling, or I won’t have been. I’ll have gone to university, or I won’t have gone.

— I’m shit at exams and stuff. Dyslexic. So I won’t have done that.

— My dad’s training me up to get into Cambridge like training a boxer for a fight. He follows me round the flat, feeding me bits of knowledge, sparring with me, trying to get me into discussing things. But I’m thinking all the time: I might, or I might not. When I split up with my boyfriend, I was in tears, desperate, all the usual stuff. And the other half of me was just watching, thinking, Oh, yes, this is what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to go through this.

Leo gets out his Zippo lighter (“My dad’s an arse, but he gives good presents”). They smoke and discuss money. Both of them will get a thousand pounds out of what Uncle Dick has left. This is good news for Leo. He has been doing temp work at some place that packages cheap jewelry, spending eight hours a day putting gold chains and earrings onto cards. Now he will be able to give that up and go out to stay with a mate whose brother is doing up a house in France. Pearl doesn’t know what she will do with her money. For the moment she will stay on in Oxford. She certainly doesn’t want to go back to live with her mother again. They aren’t getting on any better.

Pearl is not working full-time at Virgin any longer; Simon has insisted on her studying with him for her A2 exams. He doesn’t see much of Martha; he dedicates himself to Pearl in a way that half entrances and half frightens her. He will expect too much. She knew he was writing poems on his computer and once when he was out she looked for them and found them. She had expected poems to be confessions — she had hoped she would discover from reading them what her father really thought about her. But although she stared at them over and over, and although the words he used were easy ones (apart from “incarnadine,” which she couldn’t be bothered to look up), they seemed to be written in a code she did not have the information to crack. She had no idea what they were supposed to be about. There were fossils in stones, there were the smoking freezer cabinets in a supermarket, there was a bird painted on a window (or was it meant to have flown into the glass?). Mostly, there weren’t even pictures. She printed the poems out anyway and put them away inside her diary in a drawer, where he wouldn’t look.

* * *

When pearl and leo retreat indoors — it’s cold, as soon as the sun goes down — Pearl washes up accidentally against her mother.

— Isn’t that my blouse you’re wearing? Zoe can’t help herself pointing out. I thought I spotted something familiar.

She means to say this in a tone of fond amusement but knows as soon as the words are beyond recall that they make another link in the heavy chain of things misjudged between them.

— Jesus, Mum.

— Oh, we’ve all done that too, says her cousin Sophie quickly. I’m wearing Ma’s black cardigan because I didn’t have one, and Joe had to borrow Dad’s black tie. Anyway, I’m afraid that Pearl looks perfectly lovely in your blouse, Zo.

They overhear Aunt Vera from behind them.

— I lost my own little girl, you know, she is saying to someone. My nieces are very good, but it’s not the same.

(She hardly talked about Kay for forty years. Recently she mentions her often; she grows garrulous and confiding, squeezing hands and brimming easily with tears.)