Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce has had two glasses of sherry.

— I am always dreaming, she says, that I have children in the house again.

— Auntie Joyce, says Sophie, anytime you want a loan of a houseful of children, please call me.

— You’d think you’d dream about little ones, but actually my dreams aren’t. They’re adolescents: that phase when they’re impossibly leggy and long and awkward. In the dream I feel so honored, so lucky to have them there. They are so beautiful.

* * *

Later, vera is holding forth to a circle of listeners on the subject of Uncle Dick. Sitting crooked but queenly in the tall winged chair Joyce keeps for her beside the fire, she is loud with her old schoolteacherly confident authority.

— He couldn’t keep his hands to himself, she is saying. He was all over me whenever he had the chance.

Joyce wonders whether this is indecorous, on the day of the old man’s funeral. At least he is being remembered; at least there’s only family left at the party. Ray luckily can’t hear; he decided to lose the amplifier earlier in order to deter the artistic vicar and now he is listening to Coltrane through a Walkman turned up very high.

— Mother! Peter booms across the room in his big bass voice. Are you being indiscreet?

— Am I, dear?

— I fear it.

— Dick told me things I never knew about. When he was with his ship in Alexandria, the boys went to some club to see a woman dancing with a lighted cigarette in her wee-wee.

— In her what, Auntie?

— And there was me at the time, still thinking babies came out of your tummy button.

— Did you marry him for love, Vera? Did you love him? Ann asks her.

Vera shrugs her high arthritic shoulders in the baby-pink cardigan.

— Six menstruating women sharing one kitchen. Sometimes you couldn’t move for all the rags hanging up to dry. I couldn’t wait to get out.

— Good God, groans Peter comically. Someone stop her.

— Why? asked Ann. Isn’t it fascinating?

Joyce stands up to collect the plates and cups; the intimacy of family is as thick as smoke in the air.

Pearl sits cross-legged at Aunt Vera’s feet, texting somebody on her mobile.

Outside the long windows it is almost night; a few rosy clouds lit from below stand out in negative against the gray dark of the sky. Because it has come swiftly, no one has drawn the curtains or switched on the lamps; they sit in the light from the coal-effect gas fire. For hours the children (Sophie’s and her brother’s) have been playing some absorbing game of peril and escape and rescue around the flat, using as props one of Joyce’s polished stone eggs and the mirror from Vera’s handbag and a couple of plastic 007 guns. Under cover of dusk they wriggle on their bellies along the skirtings of the sitting room into the bay, where they plan in whispers together behind a chair, thinking they are invisible to the adults.

* * *

Zoe is in the garden. she finds herself wanting a cigarette, even though it’s almost twenty years since she gave up smoking; it would give her a pretext for escaping out here. A lozenge of yellow light from the kitchen window illuminates an array of Joyce’s pots planted up with spring bulbs. Joyce has a gift for making things grow: hopeless-looking bits of twig stuck in among the bulbs are swelling with new buds. Zoe sits in the near-dark on a stone bench to one side of the window. A numb cold seeps into her thighs and into her shoulders resting against the back wall of the tall house, huge blocks of red stone, roughly finished. She hasn’t brought her coat outside; she won’t be able to stay out here for long. She can hear animal rustlings in the garden, birdsong, a distant siren.

The family gathering is too overwhelming. It isn’t what her mother thinks; it isn’t that Zoe disapproves of them. She only worries that it feels too safe inside. She prefers to sit out here for a while, with her back to them all, so that she can keep watch.

Thanks to Richard Kerridge and Shelagh Weeks for reading and wise advice, and to Mary Nichols, G. Q. Williams, and Marcia Jennings for explaining things I needed to know. The Welsh Arts Council gave me a generous bursary that gave me a semester’s relief from teaching, and Bath Spa University College have been supportive and encouraging. Thanks to Jennifer Barth, whose interventions have been so creative, and to Joy Harris, Dan Franklin, and Caroline Dawnay.