Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— You wait here, he said. Good girl.

He walked up the path, feeling in his pocket for a key, then unlocked the front door and disappeared inside, closing it behind him. He was gone longer than ten minutes. Joyce tried to shrink in her seat so as not to be conspicuous to the children playing in the street. She took off her blazer. She pulled her history book from her satchel and looked at it sightlessly.

Uncle Dick came back out of the house with a bundle wrapped in brown paper under his arm. When he was halfway down the garden path, walking rather quickly, the front door flew open again behind him, and a young woman ran out after him on high heels, blond and slim. She was wearing lipstick and earrings and a pretty dress that seemed inappropriate for staying at home on an ordinary afternoon: beige, with a low-cut square neck and deep diagonal pleats across the skirt. She took Uncle Dick by the arms and remonstrated with him, seeming to want the parcel, but she wasn’t looking at him: her eyes from the very moment she flew through the door had sought out Joyce in the car, staring at her greedily and challengingly as if this contact between them was momentous. Helplessly, Joyce stared back.

Uncle Dick said something, not loudly (Joyce couldn’t hear it) but fiercely, so that the woman jerked back from him as if he had hit her. Afterward she always pictured the scene as if he had smacked her lightly and sharply across the side of the face, just as he sometimes smacked Peter when Peter was acting up, even though she knew he hadn’t actually struck this grown-up woman, not in front of her. He strode to the car and threw the parcel into the backseat. He turned the car round; the woman had stepped back into her doorway, stroking down her skirt and tidying her hair. Joyce saw she was defiantly aware, as she hadn’t been in the heat of the argument, of people watching: the children who’d stopped playing in the street and invisible others from behind the curtained windows of the inhabited houses. Joyce felt a pang of sympathy for how she was exposed.

— Oh, dear, said Uncle Dick in a wryly amused voice as they left her behind. Someone’s upset.

This tone of light comedy in relation to what had just happened was so unexpected that Joyce forgot to be afraid of him.

— Who was that? she asked.

Uncle Dick even turned his attention from the road and smiled at her inquiring eyes. — Never you mind, he said. Someone who’d better be our little secret.

— Is it her parcel?

— Oh, no. It’s just something she thinks she ought to have.

It was almost as though he was pleased that Joyce had been there to see. Perhaps he had taken her deliberately. On the way home he was expansive and genial with her as he’d never been before. When they had driven past the smelting works and left Farmouth and the docks behind, she was able to notice that it was a lovely evening. The grass was long and a tender green in the fields; the hedges were laden with pink and white May blossom.

— You’ve no idea what it’s like, Uncle Dick said. All the responsibilities of a wife and family to support. Especially after the war, which gave a man a taste for independence.

Uncle Dick had been in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves (the “wavy navy,” because they had wavy white lines around their cuffs). He was lieutenant commander of an aircraft carrier, an American lend-lease. While his ship was in New York for repairs, he had had apartments in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel; this name was always uttered with reverence in the family, as if it were the epitome of luxury. He had met Mrs. Rothschild, who organized Bundles for Britain for the sailors, and he had been given membership in the New York Athletic Club. Perhaps it was there he’d got his taste for independence.

— You get tangled up with a family, he said, before you know what opportunities are out there. Take my advice and don’t be in any hurry to be tied down with kids.

— I’m staying on at school, Joyce said, wondering if that was what he meant.

— Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Although I should think you’d want some fun too.

Uncle Dick looked assessingly sideways at Joyce for a moment.

— That’s the trouble with your aunt. She takes everything too seriously.

Joyce had never heard him say as much as this at home; she guessed it was the way he talked with his men friends. She could imagine why he’d rather sit in a bar with these friends than be at home amid all the steam of cooking and the smoke from the stove and the noisy children and wet washing draped everywhere (although she’d never seen inside a bar except in films). She felt shyly privileged that he shared his thoughts with her, as they sped through the fields in the summer evening.

— What was her name? Joyce asked him at the last minute, as he turned into the lane that led to the old gray house.

— Whose name?

— The lady you visited, in the beige dress.

— Betty Grable, he said.

Joyce protested; she wasn’t a child, to be fooled.

— If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t mind.

Uncle Dick laughed at her hurt face.

— No, it really is Betty. Not Betty Grable, just Betty. On my honor. But don’t tell. On yours?

She nodded.

Then, managing the bucking car with one hand down the rutted stony lane, he laid his other hand on her bare arm and said something strange.

— I told her you were my daughter. Just so she wouldn’t start imagining anything. You know what these women are like.

* * *

Joyce was sometimes allowed to hover on the edge of conversations Lil and Vera had in the kitchen when the other children weren’t around. This was presumably because she was the oldest and a girl; they thought it was time she began to pick up on such things, just as a year or so ago it had been time for the sanitary pads and belt that Lil had slipped without explanation into her drawer. After the dishes were washed up, the sisters sat at the table and drank milky instant coffee; when the light faded one of them would light the paraffin lamp and pump it up until the mantle glowed. The children would still be calling back and forth outside, their voices resonant and remote in the near-dark. Joyce squeezed herself inconspicuously with her book onto a little stool by the wall, picking at the black rubber flooring Uncle Dick had laid over the cold flagstones (it was made out of machine belts from some factory in the Docks that had closed down).

— It happened with Peter, and then again down here when I fell for Kay, said Vera. Not that you want them near you when you’re off-color. But you expect some consideration: not having the blame for it thrown up in your face.

— Men don’t like it, said Lil. Ivor didn’t want anything to do with it. “Let me know what we’ve had when you’re all tidied up,” he said, when things got started. Though he was always as good as gold afterward; he loved the children.

— Dick hated the sight of me. If I ever came out of the bath in my dressing gown when I was in that way he’d make a face as if I’d shown him something nasty. I knew he didn’t like to touch me, those times, even accidentally. He doesn’t even like to be near me when I’m coming unwell.

— I suppose it’s natural. We get used to it, don’t we? It must seem strange to the men.

— I’m sure he used to talk with her about what would happen, if I died having Kay, said Vera. There was something he said once, he didn’t mean it to come out, something like “if there are any complications.” And when I looked at him I just knew. And he knew I knew.

— You showed them, then.

— Oh, I wasn’t going to remove myself for anybody’s convenience. I’m not now. Whatever she may think.

It was always difficult for Joyce to take in that only four years ago Aunt Vera must have been pregnant. She tried to imagine her wearing the sort of coyly pretty maternity frocks over discreet bumps that you saw in the magazines or smiling over tiny garments for her layette. But Aunt Vera didn’t seem to have the necessary feminine attributes: she was too tall, too decided, too old; her body had entered into the phase of those lumpy stolidities that didn’t suggest the things that had to do with making babies. The pregnancy had happened after the Trowers moved down from the North. Joyce had heard Lil and the other sisters talk about this baby as Dick’s “little peace offering.”