by Tessa Hadley
—We’re looking at it from the back, said Vera. It was on a little hill like that. It’s reclaimed land all around. One of the drainage ditches ran east–west across behind; do you see that line of trees?
Nothing she could see suggested any connection to the past to Joyce.
—Do you want to get out and have a look? she suggested doubtfully. Perhaps if I drive round to the front, there’ll be a track.
—What would I want to do that for? Vera was irritated. She had been excited for a moment, identifying the place, but really it was such a ruin there wasn’t much for them to do except stare at it glumly from the car. Joyce admitted to herself that she had hoped there might at least be the shell of a house they could get close to, or even that it might still be whole and inhabited and that nice people might be living there who might invite them inside to walk around the rooms. She had imagined finding herself in the little stone apple room above the kitchen and all her childhood flooding back. She wouldn’t have admitted this hope of hers to her husband.
—The orchard’s gone, Vera said, and that’s the staircase, lying on its side.
Joyce could see then with a lurch of her heart that the zigzag thing must be a staircase. It was disconcerting, if this really was the place, to think of them climbing up and down it for all those years: it was so pointless now, lying along the ground. And she felt a surge of anger against her aunt, not just for the usual things, the melodramatic intakes of breath when she moved and the dampening remarks and the looming problems of lunch and toilets (they ended up having lunch at the dismal service station just off the motorway before the bridge, where it was easy to manage the wheelchair), but also for ever having spotted the place. If Joyce had come by herself she could have driven round and round and never been certain she hadn’t just missed it or remembered the roads wrongly.
After lunch she drove Vera across the bridge, sightseeing, and then took her back to her own house for supper. Now, in the relief of having Vera safely back in her room in the home and of her own imminent departure, she is saying nice things about their expedition, turning the story of it into a funny and perky one (no doubt the same story she’ll tell her husband later).
—I’d never have seen the house without you, you know. How ever did you pick it out? I’m so envious of your sharp eyes. I don’t think your sight’s deteriorated one bit from what it’s always been. And then your memory’s so good. But it was so strange, to actually see the place. We were so happy there.
—Speak for yourself, Vera says; I wasn’t happy.
Joyce knows she overdoes this determined cheerfulness sometimes. Vera can’t help responding to the flattery, but they are both rather ashamed of it, knowing it’s not the whole truth, knowing it’s compensation. In that room Joyce wants to heap encouragements and admiration on Vera’s head to make up for leaving her here. There’s nothing wrong with the room as such, although it is small. It has a bathroom en suite. The tea that the girls bring is all right; it is made with teabags, but at least they bring milk in a jug. There are wall-to-wall raspberry-pink carpets everywhere in the home and a great emphasis on a hotel-type kind of luxury, with reproduction antique furniture and big vases of silk flowers on tables in the hall. Vera was adamant that she didn’t want a council-run home, and the furniture is the kind of thing she aspired to herself in her middle age, when she had a bit of money to spend. But no amount of pretense that this is just another hotel can quite smother Joyce’s horrible impression of how the ones who live here wait among the remnant of their possessions as if already in transit from their real lives.
When Joyce says she is leaving, Vera has one of her momentary funny turns and reaches round in a panic for her handbag, thinking she’s coming home too; Joyce has to explain. Making her way out, Joyce is swift and free without the wheelchair. She notices that there are no mirrors where you might expect them—in the turns of the corridors, above the little pseudo-Regency occasional tables with their vases piled high with alstroemeria and peonies and lilies—and although she supposes this is not a kindness for the visitors she is quite glad not to come upon herself in here. Two girls are laughing, squealing, making up a bed in a room she passes, the sheets flying and crackling, their voices rising and hushing with that pressured importance which means they are talking about sex. With a rush of the desperate longing that most of the time she’s so good at keeping at bay, Joyce yearns to be identified with them and with all the sap and throbbing promise of the spring evening pouring in through the window beyond them, thrown open high. She’s so glad to leave the home behind and reach the street with ordinary people walking past and get into her car alone and put on a tape, something she scrabbles out of the glove box, a Taj Mahal album Zoe bought her for Christmas.
She leans across the passenger seat to pull out Vera’s crocheted cushion from where it’s slipped down the side of the seat and throw it out of sight into the back: in passing she throws a fugitive, perfunctory glance at herself in the rearview mirror. Like most of the glimpses she has of herself nowadays, it’s not conclusively satisfactory either way. She at least doesn’t catch herself looking like one of those old collapsed ones who have given up. But she isn’t confident either that what she sees—white hair cut in a short bob, tanned crinkled heart-shaped face, distinctive deep-lidded blue eyes, neat late-middle-aged prettiness—isn’t a mere hopeful habit of perception superimposed upon a reality that is in truth slipping away farther and faster than she knows.
* * *
The doorbell rings and Pearl’s friends arrive. The girls are nice to Zoe; they ask polite, interested questions about her work. Pearl appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in Zoe’s bathrobe with her hair wet; laughing, as if things have already started being funny, she calls to them to come on up. They aren’t dressed to go out yet; they’ve brought carrier bags full of clothes, and they will spend the next couple of hours trying on and borrowing and pluming in front of one another.
Zoe is going out too, to see a late film at the Arts Centre with a friend, but she doesn’t want Pearl to know this. If Pearl realizes the house is empty she will invite a whole gang of people back to her room, and then Zoe will either have to row with them to get them out or lie awake all night listening to their music and laughter and stoned noisy visits to the toilet to pee all over the floor (the boys) or throw up (one of the girls is bulimic).
As they pile upstairs chattering and Zoe is about to close the front door behind them, she sees that the clouds have broken up. The drab working-class terrace (built for the working class, that is, a century ago, and now shared by a whole mix of types and races in these socially more complicated times) is full of a rich thick yellow light. Above the roofs, baroque dramas are being acted out in the sky: dark clouds part, and effulgent pink and orange beams break through like revelations. Windowpanes blaze. A blackbird is singing improbably in the street’s one tree, a little skimpy one planted at a corner and almost defeated by the successive brutal scalpings of local gangs of kids. The blackbird is rather absurdly disproportionate to the amount of tree there is to sit in, like a bird in a child’s picture book. There’s a perfume of garlic and ginger in the air from the Bengali restaurant on the corner.
Zoe is infected by the girls’ Friday-night mood, or the change in the light, or the heedlessness of the kids careering along the pavements on their bikes.
She thinks excitedly that anything could happen.
One
After the end of the war, when she turned eleven, Joyce Stevenson won a scholarship to Gateshead Grammar; she was one of the top forty children in her year. Two years later, when they moved south to live with her Aunt Vera, her Uncle Dick arranged to have her scholarship transferred to Amery-James High School for Girls, which was in an elegant eighteenth-century house in the city. New classrooms and laboratories and a gym had been added to the old building. The girls and the life there were subtly, complicatedly different from the children and the life Joyce and her sister Ann had known before; this had
to do, they quickly understood, with a whole deep mystery of difference between the South and the North, in which their family was peculiarly entangled.
The Amery-James girls had a kind of sheen to them; their hair seemed glossier and their skin had a fresher bloom, their movements were slower and more measured. Joyce and Ann missed the boys and the men teachers. You had to watch your tongue, to hold back on some of the quick smart joking things you might have said in the North, because here what counted for glamour and importance was rather a kind of restraint and a collective know-how, knowing when it was the right season for French-skipping and cat’s cradle, knowing when these things were suddenly childish, knowing how to wear your purse belt so that it didn’t bunch up your skirt around the waist, knowing when to speak and when not to, and how to speak. There were a few girls there who had the city accent, comical and yokel-ish. You did not want, not even by default, to be counted among them. So Joyce and Ann determinedly set about losing the accents they had grown up with, never actually commenting to each other or to anyone on what they were doing, losing them until no trace was left and they no longer sounded like their mother or their aunt and uncle or their left-behind grandparents in the North.
The big old gray house they rented from the Port Authority was eight or so miles outside the city. At first their Uncle Dick drove them every morning in his car into Farmouth, the residential area behind the Docks where he worked, and they caught a bus from there into town. Then their Aunt Vera got a job teaching history at Amery-James. The girls had known, vaguely, that she had been a teacher before she married and had children, but had not imagined this was something you would ever pick up again later. It seemed incongruous (most of the teachers at the school were Miss, not Mrs.) and potentially an embarrassing pitfall, some mistake Aunt Vera had made in reading the signals of what was acceptable and appropriate.
Now Aunt Vera drove them in to school every morning, in the old Austin Seven that Uncle Dick bought her, which usually had to be started with a starting handle (Lil, their mother, sometimes came out and did it for Vera so she wouldn’t get oil on her teaching clothes). They asked to be let out some little distance from the school so they could walk the rest of the way without her. At least because their surnames were different, most of the girls never even connected Mrs. Trower to the Stevensons, and Aunt Vera never spoke to them any differently than to any of the others or gave any sign of their relationship inside school time. In fact, Joyce and Ann found that they could make for themselves a fairly effective separation between the Mrs. Trower who taught them history and Aunt Vera at home, closing off their knowledge of the one when they were dealing with the other. It was a relief that she turned out to be one of those teachers who elicited fear and respect rather than contempt. She was passionate about her subject, but that was tolerated as a kind of occupational hazard, with the same ambivalent tolerance that was extended to the brainy ones among the pupils. What was more important was that she was exacting and strict and could be scathingly sarcastic: Joyce more than once, and not without a certain private familial triumph then, saw her aunt reduce a girl to tears.
In the end-of-year revue they made fun of how, although she knew all the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, the “Trower-pot” never remembered where she’d put down her chalk. Some girl would be chosen to impersonate her who could look tall and imposing and oblivious as she did, and whose hair could be arranged to imitate how hers was always escaping in thick untidy strands from where it was pinned up behind. Joyce would assiduously shut out a picture of Aunt Vera in her dressing gown in the mornings, her worn-out gray-pink corset and brassiere strewn on the bed behind her in a tangle of bedclothes, wailing to Lil at her bedroom door through a mouthful of hairpins that her stocking had a run.
—Hell’s bells, Lil would complain, puffing upstairs with the soap and kneeling to paste it onto the run before it galloped, you only bought them stockings last week.
Her aunt’s impatience with ordinary everyday things was in reality much more complicating and painful than the innocently merry version in the revue. But the idea of the merry version was soothing; for her aunt, Joyce guessed, that journey of transition in the Austin Seven was in itself every morning a liberating shedding of complications and an opportunity to become something more exciting and more charming than was possible at home.
—I’m really so very lucky, teaching at a school like this, she said to them one morning. (They had stopped as usual in the suburban street of brutally pollarded lime trees ten minutes from Amery-James. Fringed blinds blanked out the windows in the big dumb houses.) They think that because you’re female you won’t need any further intellectual stimulation after you’re married. But take it from me, once you’ve been awakened to the life of the mind, you can’t just smother that life and put it to sleep, however inconvenient it might be for some.
This sounded like something she had been preparing to say to them: a message for Joyce, probably, rather than for Ann; Ann didn’t bother to work hard enough to get top marks. And perhaps partly because they were already in the territory in which she was the Trower-pot and must be taken notice of by the clever girls, Joyce did obediently think about her aunt’s good luck that made it possible to step out of the mess of everyday life. Her own mother Lil, who’d never been to grammar school, certainly hadn’t had that luck, and Joyce didn’t want to be powerless like her.
After the car with all its important fuss had turned the corner and the girls began walking down the leafy cut-through, Ann launched into an imitation of her aunt that was much more cruel than the one in the end-of-year revue. Ann was almost as tall as Joyce, although she was two years younger, and she had dark curling hair which made perfect ringlets when Lil put it in rags at night. Joyce was small; her hair was straight and a pale sandy red she hated. Ann wore her green coat swaggeringly with its collar up; her school hat had a permanent ridge from front to back where she shoved it out of sight into her satchel at any opportunity.
She pretended to be Uncle Dick in his courting days.
—“Go on, gi’ us a kiss, hin.” “Oh, no, I couldna do that. I’m awakening the life of the mind, you unappreciative man. I won’t be needing any further stimulation.”
—You’re a horrible little beast, said Joyce, scalded with her usual feeling of impotent indignation at her cocky little sister.
Ann crossed her eyes.
—The life of the mind, she said, in broad Tyneside. You mustn’t let it go too far.
* * *
Uncle Dick was handsome. He was tall, with black hair slicked back with scented dressing and high cheekbones and remote-seeming eyes, like a Red Indian in a film. He was kinder, Joyce noticed, to her and Ann and Martin than he was to his own children; he was disappointed with his son, Peter, for being a crybaby. But mostly he was so distracted and unaware of all the children that, in the mornings when he used to give them a lift into Farmouth, they had shyly (even Ann was shy of him) to remind him to drop them off at the bus stop. If they missed the bus, though, he would suddenly seem to wake up to where he was and race to overtake it, sounding his horn and leaning out his window. But you had to wait for him to start off those kind of excitements; if you tried to be funny when he wasn’t thinking about it, he’d snap out at you.
They understood that he must have his thoughts on his job as Chief of the Docks Police, which gave him authority over the huge vessels unloading their cargoes, and the trains “Hallen” and “Port-bury” in the sidings, and the ships’ officers and the rough frightening men, the sailors and the dockers. There were new electric cranes to lift off the bales of tobacco and barrels of sherry and the imported cars (and once—he took the boys down especially to see it—four helicopters from the U.S.A.); but you still saw the dockers running down the gangplanks of the ships with long pieces of timber on their shoulders. If the children came home from school on the bus, they were supposed to wait for their uncle in the Seamen’s Mission just outside the big locked dock gates. This was run by a
mad old woman called Mrs. Mellor, who told Joyce and Ann that you could catch a baby from using a public toilet: “Something could jump up inside you.” If it wasn’t raining they preferred to wait outside the mission on the pavement, even at the risk of having incomprehensible sinister things said to them by the men going by. The Dutch sailors were the worst. The children learned to smile politely and avoid meeting anyone’s eyes.
Joyce’s own father had been killed at Dunkirk when she was five and Ann was three and Martin just a baby. Their mother had a bottle filled with stones from the beach where he’d died: she’d gone to visit it with his parents after the war was over. Joyce could remember her father existing, and some things about what he looked like (he had pale ginger hair like hers), but she couldn’t actually remember anything he did or how the days were different when he was in them. They had come down to live with her Aunt Vera partly thinking that their Uncle Dick might take up a father’s place in their lives. Lil had said it would be good for them all to have a man around. To the children’s relief, he didn’t seem to be around all that much. He did a lot of driving backward and forward along the two miles between their house and the docks, and he was sometimes at the house for supper; but he almost always had to go back to the office in the evenings. Joyce knew when she saw into Aunt Vera’s room in the mornings that he hadn’t slept there, although his suits still hung in the wardrobe and there were things of his—a hairbrush and cufflinks and collar studs—on the dressing table that stood with its back against the window. A series of framed colored prints cut out from a Lilliput magazine hung around the bedroom walls: slim girls dressed only in diaphanous veils swinging round Greek pillars or gazing at their reflections in a lake. When Uncle Dick was in there once, getting a pair of shoes out from the wardrobe to take back in to the docks, he told Joyce they were all his old girlfriends. She thought it was funny, but she didn’t repeat the joke to Vera.
