by Tessa Hadley
* * *
For a week after Kay’s funeral, Vera stayed in her bed. The house was in disarray, the washing wasn’t done, there were no proper meals, the children when they got home from school didn’t change out of their uniforms but sat bickering or pretending to work or play battleships at the table while they listened to the noisy grieving of the two women or the quarreling between Aunt Vera and Uncle Dick. All the doors were left open and nobody tried to hide anything from them; this in itself was frightening. When a confused winter bird got in the house and flew around crashing into the windows, it only seemed like a part of the craziness that had broken in. Guiltily Joyce tried to organize a few things. She brought home potatoes and meat from town and tried to cook stew, only she didn’t know that it took hours for the meat to be tender, so they all sat round the table chewing and then leaving little parcels of pale chewed-up meat around the edges of their plates.
The other children were humbled to discover that Kay, who had been such an ordinary part of their lives and hadn’t ever been much fussed over, could produce such extravagant adult effects. When Vera was crying Peter slammed the door and sat with his fists in his ears (it was a dreadful crying, in a voice of hers they didn’t know, deep and cowlike). One evening Vera came down into the kitchen in her dressing gown with her hair wild and told Lil that she had seen a blue light hovering in her room and had seemed to feel the weight of a child laid in the bed beside her.
—You know about this stuff. I suppose you’ll say it was some sort of sign.
—I wish she would come to me, said Lil dully. I can’t feel anything.
—Is that the next thing? asked Vera. Am I going to go mad? Am I going to start seeing visions and believing in spirits?
Then on the morning she was supposed to return to Amery-James she got up early and washed and dressed in her gray suit absolutely as usual, and pinned up her hair without a word, her brown complexion bleached, her lips pale, her eyes looking swimming and full not because she was weeping but because of how the flesh had fallen away from her face. Ann reported that at school the girls were frightened to do the least thing in lessons to cross her; a lugubrious cult grew up around her bereavement. Joyce was disgusted when she discovered that Ann had taken a photograph of Kay into school to pass around. Some girls had actually shed tears over it.
When Joyce was rummaging in Lil’s drawer one morning, wanting to borrow her pair of black kid gloves, she found Kay’s scrap of sucky blanket.
—Shouldn’t you give this to Auntie Vera? she said.
—She’s never asked me for it. She’s never thought about it.
It hadn’t been washed and still had its grubby salty smell.
—Don’t tell her I’ve got it, Lil said. I don’t see why I shouldn’t keep something. It’s nothing anybody else could want. But no doubt she’d find some way of putting me in the wrong over it.
She was sitting at her dressing table but not combing her hair or patting Nivea into her cheeks. Joyce put the bit of blanket away where she had found it, under the pretty perfectly pressed blouses, satin or with lace collars or embroidery, that were never worn. She wondered what her mother did all day at home without Kay to look after. When they all drove off to the city in the Austin in the mornings (Martin had after all got his place at the Cathedral School and was already stealing chemicals from the science labs to make explosives at home), there was a bend in the lane where they used to look back and wave to Lil and Kay. Now Lil didn’t even come out to see them off.
To Joyce’s dismay, when she talked about the possibility of renting a flat in the city for her second year at college, Lil said she thought it was a good idea and she would bring Ann and Martin and come and live with her.
—I could get a little job to help us all out: with that and the pension we could manage fine.
—Is Aunt Vera’s new house ready for her then?
—I hope she isn’t building any hopes on that. Vera’ll never see the inside of that house. It’s time she faced up to certain things.
It was true that they hadn’t seen much of Uncle Dick since Kay died, after the first few days. When Vera was in her worst state, staying in bed all day and refusing to eat, he came once and went into the bedroom and brought out all his suits and ties. He didn’t speak to any of them. Peter hated him. Joyce had witnessed a queer sort of fight between them: Peter planting himself with his arms and legs straddled across the kitchen doorway to block his father, saying he wanted to know “what was going on.” He had a long bony face that had somehow never looked right on a child’s body; it was better now he was growing taller and bigger to fit it, but he still couldn’t stop himself from weeping with vexation whenever he was angry. One of the hens scuttled past him into the room, and he kicked at it, missing and raising a flurry of squawks. Uncle Dick tried to push him out of the way and Peter clung to him with his arms and legs, sobbing that he wouldn’t let him go until he told him where he was going.
Uncle Dick had looked at him dully and with disgust.
—Think of your little sister, he said. You should be ashamed of yourself, making a scene like a girl.
* * *
It seemed as though once the doors were opened in that house, any kind of crazy desperate thing could fly inside. In the spring after Kay died, Vera was hatching a plan.
—Your aunt’s got some daft idea, said Lil.
—It’s not an idea, said Vera, it’s my duty.
Joyce stood blinking in the lamplight, in her taffeta striped skirt and her Wellingtons; she was carrying her coat over her arm and her high-heeled brown suede sling-back shoes hooked by their straps over one finger. She had stayed for a party in town and caught the last bus home, which took her as far as Hallam: there she had fished out her Wellingtons from under the hedge where she had hidden them in the morning and walked the last two miles in the moonlight. An owl had swooped over her head and her heart turned over; a car passed and she hid from it in the bushes. And all the time her thoughts had been so entirely absorbed in replaying the confused and intricately significant exchanges of the party she had left behind that now, as the two of them turned on her as she came through the door, she hardly knew where she was. She was afraid they would notice on her breath what she had been drinking: a fruit cup made deadly with pure alcohol stolen from the hospital by someone’s boyfriend who was a medic. Luckily she had walked off the worst of her intoxication, only as she adjusted to the paraffin-smelling warmth she swayed with a twinge of nausea.
Lil had put a beer set on her hair and it was pinned to her head in flat curls tied around with an old scarf.
—Vera wants to bring our Gilbert to live here.
—Who’s Gilbert?
—Our brother Gilbert.
—I thought he went away?
—He’s been ill. He needs a home to go to.
—You don’t know what he’s like, said Lil. For all you know, he may have had operations; he may be worse.
—Why did he go away in the first place?
—There was trouble. He fought with your grandfather.
—Your grandfather was a real Victorian, said Lil, with pride. He didn’t have the modern ideas about encouraging children. After Ernest went off to the war, he came down very hard on Gilbert, because he was the only one he’d got left—the only son.
When they lived in the North, Joyce had often visited the tiny terraced house where her mother and aunt and their five brothers and sisters grew up, with its curtains pulled almost across at the parlor window, even in daylight, and a hairy sofa that prickled the backs of bare legs tormentingly. A short walk away from the house down a side street, through a door locked with a key, was her grandfather’s garden, full of brilliant flowers; once he had cut a big red one to put behind her ear, and then later at tea an earwig had crawled out of it and fallen onto her frock. Vera and Lil told fearsome stories of their father, of how he was so strict that when they were children they had to stand up to eat at table, and how once he snatched a b
ook Vera was reading and threw it into the fire. Joyce found it hard to connect these stories with the gentle old man she remembered, scrupulous to protect her frock and shoes from dirt, laying out a bit of clean sack on top of a bucket for her to sit on. His huge hard hands and flat fingers were covered with old seams and scars that were blue like ink from the coal dust that got in (he worked in a mine). Dexterously he twisted off dead flower heads, pulled out weeds, and fastened leaning stems to lengths of cane with raffia, but when he put the flower in her hair his fingers trembled with the effort, as though she were something he was afraid to touch.
He was dead now, and her grandmother lived with one of her other daughters in Hebburn and couldn’t remember things.
—They were uneducated people, said Vera. That could be forgiven them. But they had a hatred of learning. I used to creep down at night and rake up the coals to read by. Of course I pulled that book back out of the fire, but it was scorched and dirty. It was a library book: Mrs. Cruikshank’s John Halifax, Gentleman. I thought I would never be able to visit the library again, I thought that was an end of everything I cared about. But then I met the librarian in the street, and she was so kind, and I told her all of it, and she came round and talked to Mam and Dad. “You don’t know what a precious thing you’ve got here,” she said. Not that they listened.
Several of Aunt Vera’s stories featured women like this, enlightened and resilient and independent, intervening on her behalf with the forces of ignorance and superstition. As well as the librarian, there was the teacher at grammar school who’d helped her get into college and an older friend at the Girl Guides who’d started her off on her botany and her interest in old churches.
—Uncle Gilbert won’t want to come here, will he? Joyce asked. Hasn’t he got a home of his own?
Lil looked a heavy warning at her sister.
—I’ve changed, Joyce, said Vera dramatically. I can’t just sit back and watch all the iniquity of the world and not do anything about it.
Joyce shrugged.
—Just so long as it doesn’t mean I have to share my room with Ann.
—Vera should learn to let well alone, said Lil with foreboding.
It occurred to Joyce that Gilbert might have been in prison. The idea alarmed her; but she didn’t want to ask them directly. There was something that made Joyce queasy in the conspiratorial way the two sisters sat brooding over things together at the kitchen table, even when they were quarreling. Their talk was as dark and thick and sticky as the malt and cod-liver oil the children were dosed with to keep off colds. She didn’t want to give them the opportunity to hush up and exchange scalding glances and shut her out. She concentrated on her plans to get away and live a new young person’s life with her friends in town.
* * *
Mysterious letters arrived at the house. Aunt Vera snatched them up and read them when she came in after school, not even waiting to take off her hat and gloves. Lil wrung her tea towel into a wet knot, in anxious resistance. Then in the Easter holidays Vera drove off in the Austin Seven and was gone three days without any explanation. Joyce was drawing in the apple room when she heard the car whining in the lane and looked out of the window to see it nose onto the cobbles in front of the house, Aunt Vera sitting upright and tense in the passenger seat and at the wheel a boy with a long pale face and a tall shock of hair that looked fair through the windscreen glass. In fact, when he stepped out of the car she saw that he was a man, not a boy, and that his hair was silvery, like straw left to leach its color out in the rain. Aunt Vera climbed shakily from her side, and Joyce knew from the stoop of her shoulders and her brave lopsided smile, as she threw her hand in a gesture of welcome around at the house and the outbuildings, that she was already full of doubt at what she had done, bringing her brother home (in spite of herself, Vera could never smother how her posture and movements exposed the truth of her feelings).
Joyce could not think why Gilbert had come. He was tall and thin, and although he didn’t have a young face he seemed awkward like a teenager, with extravagantly long limbs and ears and nose reddened as if they had stuck out too far into a rough wind. He stood lost in the slight drizzle in the yard and showed no sign of feeling rescued. Vera had to take him by an elbow and coax him inside. The sleeves of his suit were too short above his bony wrists.
—Lillie’s here, Lil’s here, she said. Come in and see Lillie.
He submitted to her.
They were all introduced to him in the crowded kitchen (Peter came from his violin practice, Martin from where he was building a rocket in an outhouse). Gilbert’s shirt collar was yellowed and tight over his Adam’s apple; his big shoes were cracked and hard and mottled with white as if they had been put away too long in a cupboard; his deep-set blue eyes were glancing and evasive. He put his arms around Lil, who turned to him from where she had lifted a panful of her special doughnuts out of the stove with a blank reluctant face; she patted his bent back as if she were soothing a child.
—Hallo, Gil, she said warily. After all this time.
At the kitchen table he ate one doughnut after another, while they were still too hot for the others to touch.
—Did you fight in the war? Martin asked him.
—I did not, he said, licking sugar from his fingers intently. I wanted to, but they wouldn’t allow it.
The children couldn’t always understand him; he mumbled to himself, and his Tyneside accent was broad.
—Gilbert was in hospital, Vera explained busily. He’s been ill a long time, but he’s better now. And a good thing too, that he wasn’t sent to the slaughter. This family gave enough of their young men.
—Our brother Ernest was killed, said Gilbert. And Ivor, your father.
—He remembers! said Lil, as if he’d accomplished something.
—Well, of course he remembers.
They gave him Kay’s room for his own. Lil had dismantled the cot while Vera was away.
—Shouldn’t there be another child? asked Gilbert. A little girl?
For an uncomfortable moment they all thought he meant Kay.
—Oh, Ann’s at a friend’s house! Joyce suddenly understood. She’ll be back for tea.
He nodded.
—I was sure there was two of you.
—Did they cut him? Has he had any operation? Joyce overheard Lil hiss to Vera under cover of a clatter of pans.
—He has not. The doctor said he had an insulin treatment. I can’t speak highly enough of Dr. Gurton. He’s a very dedicated and humane man. He spoke of great changes to come, with new pharmaceutical developments in the field.
—Gilbert doesn’t seem too bad, said Lil cautiously.
* * *
He wasn’t a nuisance around the place. He mostly sat in his room at first, or at the kitchen table, spelling stubbornly through an old newspaper, or he threw sticks for Winnie the bulldog in the field beyond the house. They were all obscurely weighed down with anxiety for him, however, and relieved if ever he showed signs of being happy with them. A one-sided grin slipped on his face occasionally, like the quick flare of an unexpected light. Something in his movements was not quite right for a man of almost thirty; he was too quick and loose and absorbed in himself; he hadn’t assumed the containment and responsive gravity of a grown-up. Martin imitated his slow shuffling walk and his accent; Gilbert didn’t seem to mind. He listened respectfully while Martin explained his latest science project. (This had to do with the parable about the man who was paid in grains of rice on a chessboard, doubling for each square. Martin and his friend were calculating how many grains there would actually be by the sixty-fourth square, and how many it took to make up a square inch, and whether the rice would really cover India a foot deep.)
In his suitcase Gilbert had brought a little case of bits of stuff for making flies for fishing, and for a while he and Martin drew close together, fiddling with pliers and cobbler’s wax, tying fantastically intricate creations out of brightly dyed feathers and bits of tinsel and squirr
el hair. He showed Martin how to wet his fingers and run them down the feathers so that the fibers separated and stood out at right angles to the quill. But Gilbert didn’t have the patience for the fishing itself; much to Martin’s indignation he wandered off and came home after an hour or so, leaving Martin to pack away the rods. “He’s got no sticking power,” Martin complained. Neither of them really knew how to fly-fish anyway; it seemed Gilbert had only been taught how to make the flies, not use them. The other thing Gilbert could do impressed Martin more. When he found that Martin had a welding torch and a clamp (they had been Ivor’s), he asked for everyone’s spare pennies and halfpennies, and in one of the outhouses he began welding together a model airplane out of the coins, a Hurricane. He had a picture to work from, torn out of a magazine. The model was a complex and beautiful thing: quite large, about eighteen inches from end to end of the fuselage. The coins were welded together like miniature riveted plates, then burnished coppery pink. Martin learned how to heat the coins and shape them, but he could never make them curve with Gilbert’s precision. Gilbert even made a little pilot, with a tiny helmet, and tiny hands on the controls, and a tiny coppery face with a mustache. He said he had learned to do this in hospital. His life seemed to be made up of hobbies and not of real man’s work, as if he were stuck in boyhood.
