by Tessa Hadley
—Hot ride? Joyce said.
—Bloody hot, said Daphne. Want to feel?
And she pulled her sopping shirt away from her wet back as if Joyce seriously might.
Daphne didn’t exactly make conversation; she kept up a stream of jokes and sayings and teasings. When she made a burping noise she said, “Pardon me for being rude; it was not me, it was my food”; she told Peter to stop gawping or the wind would change and he’d be stuck like that; she said, “Every little helps, said the lady as she piddled in the sea,” and, when she leaned across someone, “Scuse me reaching, I’ve just got off the boat.”
When Martin and Peter disappeared sometimes in the evenings, Joyce suspected they were haunting the dunes behind the beach in hope and dread of finding Gilbert and Daphne there together.
—She’s foul, Mum, said Peter. You should tell Uncle Gilbert he’s not allowed to bring her in the house.
—He’s a perfect right to make friends with whoever he likes, Vera said sorrowfully.
* * *
Influenced by Mr. Scofield, his violin teacher, Peter had started listening to classical music. They had a gramophone in the front room that Dick had bought secondhand for Vera in the North: a tall wooden cabinet with a lid that propped open at the top, doors at the front, a wind-up handle on the side. The needles were made of bone and had to be sharpened on a piece of emery paper; new ones were kept in a tiny tin with the His Master’s Voice dog on the front. Peter sorted through the records in their brown card sleeves, mastering the names of the composers, sampling and replacing them, quickly expert in the rituals of placing the record, checking it for dust, lowering the arm. Vera found him adjusting the speed because the turntable was too slow and played everything slightly out of tune. She would never have noticed. She gave way to her son with a new respect and sat mutely while he explained to her.
—Listen to this, Ma, this is a jolly bit. Then it gets all tragic and moody. Especially listen to the horns. Only they ought to be brighter. The Philharmonic do it better; you should hear the recording old Scoffer’s got, it’s splendid.
The front room smelled of damp. The flags were laid directly on the earth, and they hardly ever lit a fire in there except at Christmas. It was overcrowded with big pieces of furniture, chairs and sideboards and occasional tables that no one had tried to arrange properly. Vera’s things were heavy carved oak; she and Dick had bought them along with their first house in Gateshead. Lil’s were cheap utility. They were doubled up in readiness for when their lives might separate again.
Peter was as tall as Vera was now. He started to advise her on her dress, as well as on her reading and her opinions. Her blue scarf was a ghastly clash with her green blouse, and if she didn’t replace her horrible old handbag he wouldn’t be seen out with her. She ought to read Dylan Thomas and George Barker, not stuffy old Masefield and de la Mare. Vera was surprisingly compliant, almost girlish in her willingness to relinquish her command to this authoritative son. She looked at him in quizzical pleased surprise, as though she did not quite know where he had sprung from.
* * *
Gilbert said he was going to Marry Daphne, but no one knew whether he had really asked her. Ann pestered him over it: Was it going to be in church? What would Daphne wear? Had he bought her a ring? Would there be bridesmaids?
—And if you have children, what are you going to call them?
—Now that’s enough, said Lil sternly. Stop that teasing.
—It’s not teasing, Ann said, opening her eyes wide. Isn’t it real? Why can’t I ask him?
One summer afternoon Joyce was packing in her bedroom; she was going to spend a week in Paris with friends from the Art College. Dresses and blouses and underclothes, carefully mended and pressed, were laid out on the bed beside the open suitcase. She had sewed herself a new gray Liberty print dress with a full skirt and a white patent-leather belt; to earn the money for this and for the trip she had been working since the college term ended for a friend of Uncle Dick’s in a marine insurance office in the city. Swallows were swooping dizzily in the big empty blue bowl of sky outside; the wood pigeons were heating up their end-of-tether crooning; the weather was languid and dreamy. Then Gilbert was suddenly in the yard, home from the Brookeses before he should have been, in a flurry of noise and banging.
Joyce looked out from her window; Lil and Ann ran from the kitchen to see what the matter was. Gilbert picked up the tin bucket from where it stood outside the back door and sent it hurtling across the yard. Lil had washed the kitchen floor and the bucket was full of dirty water, which sluiced out in an interesting arc, sending the hens squawking and flattening themselves close to the ground in panic. The bucket bounced off a wall and along the cobbles with a jubilant clanging. Lil and Ann screamed. Gilbert kicked at the hens, and then he picked up the outhouse shovel and hurled that after the bucket.
—Gilly, don’t! cried Ann.
—Stop it, stop that! said Lil, running after him and trying to hold on to him.
He reached around for something else to throw, found the bike he’d just ridden back on, and picked it up in his hands as if it were a toy.
—Whatever’s the matter? Put that down and stop misbehaving. You’ll hurt somebody.
Gilbert didn’t say a word. He lifted the heavy old bike right up above his head and flung it down flat so that it jarred and leaped and skidded on its side across to where Ann dodged quickly back inside the kitchen. The bike lamp crunched and sprinkled glass like sugar; the front wheel buckled. Gilbert shook off Lil and picked up a rusted old rake, which he thrust deliberately through a window with an explosive tinkling; it was only a small filthy old cobwebbed pane in the outhouse where they kept the chicken feed and paraffin. Then, with the rake, Gilbert strode off down the side of the house.
Lil burst into tears and held her apron over her face.
Vera had been making notes from a new book on Victorian social reform at a table in the front room. Now she came blinking into the aftershock of the scene.
—Goodness me, she said, whatever was all that about?
—You see, said Lil, shaking her head behind her apron, he isn’t all right.
—What did he say?
—He didn’t say anything. He’s gone down to the rhine.
Vera took in the damage: it didn’t look much with Gilbert gone, just the bike sprawled down and the yard untidy.
—Well, this is too silly, she said. I suppose I’d better go after him and ask him what’s going on, if nobody else will.
She pushed her hair behind her ears and set off down the path with an impatient schoolmistress’s forbearing frown and authoritative step.
—He’s got the rake! shouted Lil.
—Oh, has he indeed! Vera retorted, undeterred.
Joyce joined the others downstairs, and they waited in the yard for Vera to come back.
—Will he try to drown himself? Lil said suddenly.
Ann and Joyce looked at her in dismay; although the rhines were so dry in the summer months that drowning would have taken some ingenuity.
There was a sudden fracas of agitated honking from the geese down at the rhine. Then they saw Vera: running and leaping up the path in her stocking feet, her shoes kicked off somewhere, her hair flying and her mouth open, yelling to them to get inside. They bundled in and she flew into the house after them, gasping for breath, and slammed and bolted the door, leaning back against it with her chest heaving and her hair drooping out of its pins. She and Lil stared wide-eyed at each other.
—Did he say anything?
Vera shook her head.
—Did he go for you?
She nodded.
—Hell’s bells.
For the rest of the afternoon they stayed bolted in the house in a state of siege, with someone on lookout at the upstairs window for when the boys came back from fishing. Lil thought they should phone Dick, but Vera said to wait and see how Gilbert was when he calmed down. They waited for him to turn up at the house, with or wi
thout his rake. By nighttime he still hadn’t come; they went to bed with the back door bolted but left the outhouses open so he would have somewhere warm to sleep.
* * *
In the morning Ann said that Gus was acting funny. Vera went out to see if Gilbert was anywhere around; she even went down to the rhine and back, treading carefully in her slippers in the dew, looking for her shoes beside the path.
—Gone, she said, he’s gone.
The sisters looked at each other in consternation.
—What will he do? said Lil.
—What shall I tell Dr. Gurton? Vera wailed.
They stuffed her shoes with newspaper and put them to dry, while they used the telephone to call the hospital, long distance.
—Look at Gus, said Ann. There’s something wrong with him.
The geese were in the yard, wanting to be fed. Gus stood apart from the others, his wings half open and dragging, his eyes filmed over. He wouldn’t let any of them come near him—he flapped and struggled if they tried—but they could see his neck was twisted, with an ugly lump in it, and he couldn’t hold up his head. Vera sent Martin to call Farmer Brookes, who came round to have a look.
—How’s he gone and done that? the farmer said.
—We don’t know, said Vera and Lil together.
—We just found him like that, when we got up this morning, Lil added.
The farmer persuaded Gus that he meant well, and Gus let him probe gently with his fingers into the creamy neck.
—Looks like it’s broken, I’m afraid, poor old chappie. Got caught, maybe, in a bit of wire or something; although he’s not cut himself. Got any apples left to make sauce? Might as well put him out of his misery, Mrs. Stevenson. Want me to see to it?
Farmer Brookes carried Gus off through the orchard in the morning sunshine, holding him around the middle; Gus opened his wings so that it looked as though the farmer as he walked was wrestling with an angel. Ann wouldn’t watch him go; she sank down on the doorstep with her head buried in her arms in grief. They told the Brookeses to eat the goose themselves.
* * *
When joyce came back from paris, she caught the last bus out of the city to the docks; she had arranged to telephone from the Docks Police Station for Vera to come and pick her up in the car. The bus was crowded. A horrible old sailor with gray stubbly cheeks and breath that reeked of drink fell asleep beside her, and his head rolled onto her shoulder so many times that she gave up trying to push him off. She concentrated all her efforts on keeping Paris intact inside her—coffee and bread and Dior and wine and a little restaurant with red-checked tablecloths on the Boul’ Mich—so as not to lose one precious drop in collision with the ugly things of home. She had felt instantly, intimately, that she belonged to Paris; miraculously, she had seemed to understand what the Parisians said to her, far beyond the reach of her schoolgirl French. When the bus stopped and all the passengers shuffled up to get off, she realized with a shock that Daphne had been sitting all the time only a couple of seats behind her. Joyce had to pull down her heavy suitcase from the rack; she was hotly aware of the other girl watching her struggle, but they didn’t smile or even look at each other.
As Joyce carried her suitcase the fifty yards in the dark to the dock gates, Daphne came up swiftly behind her on her bike, which she must have left locked up somewhere near the bus stop. Joyce heard the whirring of her wheels and smelled Chypre de Coty.
—Bong-jooer. Had a nice time in old gay Paree?
—Yes, thank you, said Joyce.
Daphne was wobbling on the bike, weaving the handlebars to keep pace with Joyce’s walking.
—Where’s Gilbert? she asked.
—I don’t know. He went away, I think.
Daphne described a wide arc, then came alongside Joyce again.
—One sandwich short of a picnic, if you ask me. Something funny about him.
Joyce changed hands on her suitcase.
—Don’t you think?
—I’m afraid I have to go in here, said Joyce, to use the telephone.
Daphne grinned incredulously through the gates at the police station; possibly she thought Joyce was so frightened of her that she was going to take refuge with the law.
—Oh, well, she said, if you see him, tell him au revoyer from me. Tell him he’s a naughty boy, leaving my uncle in the lurch.
She cycled off under the streetlamps, making the bike dance in wide curves from one side of the road to the other, sitting back on the saddle with her hands in the pockets of her short jacket.
* * *
They found out that gilbert had hitched his way up north to see his mother; their sister Selina, whose husband played the clarinet at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, gave him some money. After that there was no news from him for years. He left the model Hurricane with half a fuselage and one wing; Martin tried to finish it but in the end had to resign himself to building a crash scene around it, using artificial grass from the greengrocer’s and making ruined buildings out of papier-mâché, decorating them with German shop signs and a Nazi flag.
Someone explained to Joyce much later—at a time when all the old methods of treating psychiatric patients were coming into disrepute and everybody was reading R. D. Laing—what the insulin treatment actually consisted of. Patients fasted for fourteen hours and then were put into a rubber sided bed, as a protection against the convulsions produced by the drug; an insulin coma was deliberately induced, and then the patient had to be revived by counteractive injections into the vein. These didn’t always work; sometimes there was an unseemly struggle round the bed, bringing the patient back to consciousness. Joyce told admiringly then the story of her aunt’s rescue; she didn’t confess how fervently at the time she had wished Gilbert back where he came from, and how sometimes even now she looked and didn’t look for him with guilty dread in the faces of the beggars and winos who passed her in the street.
Lil became convinced Gilbert had joined up and fought in Korea and died there. She said she’d seen him once at a séance; she spoke about it in the special voice she used for the transcendent: stubborn and emotionally uplifted.
—He was in uniform. He was all bloody. But he was very calm, and smiling. He came to tell us that he was finally at peace.
This voice particularly irritated Vera.
—It’s enough to make anyone despair, said Vera. How can you be comforted by something that didn’t happen? You don’t seem able to distinguish between dreams and real things.
Vera at that time was clearing out cupboards in the old house, throwing away the accumulated rubbish of their life there with ruthlessness and zeal. She and Peter were going to move into a flat near Amery-James; she was going to start divorce proceedings against Uncle Dick.
—Peace! she exclaimed. What kind of travesty is that? Peace through war. Is that the best solution you can come up with?
Three
Ray and Iris Deare were one of the couples everyone wanted to know. They were both painters. As soon as Ray finished studying Fine Art at the college he had been invited to join the teaching staff; he taught drawing to Joyce in her second year. She was terrified of him, always imagining how impatient he must feel at having to be bothered with her flawed work. There were others in the class, talented and confident, with whom Ray carried on a dialogue she greedily listened in on and soaked up: Cézanne’s petite sensation, the difference between Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist experiments, the importance of the spaces between the shapes, the need for a pencil no harder than HB and no softer than B, Degas’s lithographs of prostitutes. The first time she heard her teacher use the word “prostitute” casually, as if it was just another fact in the world, Joyce felt something crumble in the pit of her stomach, choking and intoxicating her.
Ray hardly ever spoke to her directly, even when sometimes he reached across her shoulder to change something in her drawing, so that his tweedy rough sleeve was against her cheek for a few moments and she could smell his cold pipe in his pocke
t. He was untidy, shortish, with a crumpled lyrical face and brown curly hair; his wet brown eyes might have been doglike, pleading and needy, except that they were always veiled with irony and jokes.
—Miss Stevenson, he said to her once, you’re not looking. You’re only drawing what you think is there. Don’t think. You have to learn to be stupid in order to draw.
Joyce didn’t mind. She knew what he meant. She liked the invitation to be stupid. She practiced losing herself in the quiet of the life room, where the intent soft patter of pencils and charcoal was necessary and soothing as breathing. If anyone spoke, it woke her as if from a dream.
Iris Deare was training to be a primary school teacher. In the beginning it was Iris whom Joyce was in love with, at least as much as Ray. It was Iris who invited her round to visit them at their flat perched high on the first floor of one of the old steep Georgian terraces that overhung the river in Hilltop. In the sitting room—the lounge, Joyce learned to call it—there were three floor-length sash windows. Joyce had never seen anything like this room before; it was an inspiration. The floorboards were painted black, the walls were gray and hung with paintings and drawings and prints wherever there was space; nothing in the room was there because it was useful but only if it was interesting or beautiful. A huge old antique chaise longue stood along the back wall, its leather ripped and its horsehair stuffing leaking out; it was heaped with cushions, embroidered oriental ones and homemade ones covered in Liberty fabrics or batik prints Iris had done herself. In one corner of the room stood an old rocking horse with its paint washed off and its mane and tail worn down to stubble: Iris had found it put out with the rubbish in the street.
—Poor old love, she said crooningly, rubbing the horse’s stubble with her cheek, kissing his flaring nostrils that had once been brilliant red, we think he’s a magnificent charger still, don’t we?
One end of the long room, beyond a sagging screen of carved oriental wood, was given over to be Ray’s studio. The flat always smelled of paint and turps. There were no curtains at any of the windows: Joyce couldn’t imagine how that felt, never being able to close yourself off from being seen.
