by Tessa Hadley
Joyce would have liked to have turned her and her friend away there and then, telling them frankly she had no time to stop, but she didn’t have quite that kind of relationship with her sister, and she knew Ann would take offense if she was blunt. Although Ann’s style at the moment was to appear defiantly and extravagantly ordinary, full of contempt at any pretension to superiority, this did not mean that she was indifferent to criticism. In fact she was particularly touchy and quick to imagine she was being condescended to.
—What a shame, Joyce said, frowning and shaking her head as if with real regret. I’m just on my way out. I’ve got an appointment at the hairdresser’s. (She didn’t want to mention the dinner party in case Ann took it into her head to turn up uninvited; she was quite capable of this.)
—Just let us in for a quick coffee, Ann wheedled. We’re absolutely gasping. We’ve been working like blacks.
Under their drooping macs, worn undone with the belts hanging down, they were in their waitress uniforms, striped like nurses’ dresses. The zoo was only ten minutes’ walk away from Joyce’s flat, but Ann hadn’t ever come round in her breaks before, so no doubt this was supposed to be something of an honor.
Joyce looked at her watch.
—I’ve got to take the children round to Mum’s. Auntie’s looking after them. But I suppose I could stop, if it’s just for ten minutes.
—You’re a brick, sis, said Ann, who never called her that. They piled past her in the narrow entrance passage. Both of them had their hair back-combed into bouffant mounds and their faces elaborately made up with black eyebrow pencil, thick mascara, pink lipstick. The friend, who was tall and skinny with a poor complexion, gave a startled hostile look around at the glowing flat.
Ann hugged the bemused children.
—You poor little things, she said. Mummy’s going to leave you with old Auntie Vera. I’ll bet she makes you do lots of horrible jobs for her. That’s what she used to do with me, when she was my teacher.
Daniel began to cry, not because he understood but because he had only just woken up.
—Mummy, we don’t want to stay with Vera, Zoe whined.
While Joyce put the kettle on to boil, Ann took her friend into the lounge.
—Come and look. D’you want to see some paintings by the great artist?
They were smoking; Joyce was sure they were dropping ash on the clean carpet. She overheard them whispering together and then exploding into giggles. In her extreme irritation she forgot her diet and ate two biscuits.
—We reek of elephants, said Ann. We took a ride. Leslie likes the keeper who does the rides.
—I do not, protested Leslie.
The girls bantered private jokes and opinions of the zoo staff over their coffee as if Joyce weren’t there; or perhaps she was required as witness to their devil-may-care fun. It was hard to believe that Ann with her studied flat hardness was the same girl who had once carried a volume of John Donne poems with her everywhere and insisted on reading aloud from it in the street. By the time they finally left, Joyce was half an hour late; she would have to ask to use the phone in the cake shop to persuade the hairdresser’s to hang on for her.
As Ann and Leslie skittered their way down the drive to the gate in their high heels, lighting up more cigarettes (only in order to shock, Joyce was sure), their voices squealing and screeching unnecessarily loudly, Joyce glanced involuntarily up at the windows of the ground floor flat where the Reverend and Mrs. Underwood lived. It was a huge Victorian house: there were two more flats above the Underwoods, let to old ladies. You didn’t often see the Underwoods themselves at their windows, but set into the glass panes in their front room were those kind of ventilators that looked like empty reels of recording tape; these turned and rattled in the slightest breeze, and to Joyce they always seemed to be taking note on behalf of the Reverend of any inappropriate behavior from herself or her family or visitors. He was an old square bear of a man with ragged gray hair, not feminized in the least by his black cassock, whose skirts flew out ahead of him in pace with his long stride; his wife was pale and fragile and oozed a compensatory sweetness. The Reverend growled and barked whenever he met Joyce, often incomprehensibly, always with imperturbable and disapproving authority. Ray and he had had one or two blazing rows, over music in the evenings or the children playing on the front lawn, but Joyce was sure it was for her that the Reverend reserved his most disgusted disapproval. No matter how abjectly friendly and conciliatory she tried to be, she was sure he could see through this to her essential light worldliness.
* * *
She finally got the children settled down with vera. Vera seemed to have girded herself up in an overall for the occasion, as if looking after them might involve particularly dirty work; there was uncharacteristic trepidation in her face. The children were also subduedly ill at ease. Daniel got out his dinky cars; Zoe tipped her jigsaw out on the dining table and stolidly began to sort out the edge pieces.
—She’s so like Kay, said Vera, as she always did. It’s the same face.
Joyce wouldn’t hear of it.
—Not in the least. She’s like Nana Deare; she’s nothing like my family.
And she touched Zoe lightly with the back of her fingers against her cheek, as if to ward off even the remote chance of harm through analogy. She slipped out while Vera was offering the children orange squash and hardened herself when she heard Daniel wail by thinking ahead to the hairdresser’s and the beef olives and the need to brush the lounge carpet again. In the cake shop her mother in her frilled apron and cap was picking out iced fancies with the tongs for a customer and arranging them in a box. Joyce squeezed round the counter into the little cubbyhole at the back, where the phone was fixed on the wall in the midst of a flurry of pinned-up orders and invoices.
—Madam may be delayed now, said the receptionist at Hair Boutique. We always give priority to the clients who arrive in time for their appointments.
—Blast, blast, breathed Joyce to herself, clenching the receiver with her fist in its tan glove that matched her shoes and bag. She hadn’t wanted to arrive there on that footing, flustered and in the wrong. She knew how important it was to assert in these situations one’s serene sense of superiority, from which, firmly established, one could then condescend as nicely as anything if one wished.
She left a threepenny bit for the call beside the phone. Lil looked up from tying the box of cakes with paper string.
—Mrs. H says I can go at three, she said muffledly out of the side of her mouth. Mr. and Mrs. Harper were good employers—they let the staff use the shop phone, for instance, as long as it wasn’t too often—but of course you were not supposed to carry on conversations about your private life in front of the customers. Lil was happy in this job; she enjoyed the camaraderie with the other “girls” and all the minute variations in the same safe daily routine. (Sometimes if Joyce thought back to the days out on the estuary, when her mother had been left alone all day so far from anywhere and with no transport, she wondered how she had ever endured it.)
—I should think Vera’ll be glad of you by then, she whispered back.
—Don’t you worry about her, pet. You go on and enjoy yourself.
Joyce had never been to this hairdresser’s before; she had hardly ever needed to have her hair done, since she had been wearing it for years in a long plait down her back or pinned up behind. But now she had made up her mind to have it all cut off. She had been nursing for several weeks now, a vision of herself, different: freed of the plait and its vaguely East European peasant overtones, too sincere and poignant and wholesome. Her new look would be more urbane and teasing, grown-up and modern and knowing. She was ready for something new, although her thoughts on this as yet didn’t go beyond the hair and the gray dress.
* * *
Hair boutique was on green street, the steep elegant street with the best shops that led down from Benteaston into the center of town. The name was scrawled diagonally in pink cursive script acr
oss a plate glass window thickly draped inside with white nylon. It was expensive—Joyce was going to pay ten shillings and sixpence for her cut and set, when she could have got it for five shillings where Lil went—but she dreaded having her idea for her hair misinterpreted, and it had seemed safest to go to the most fashionable place.
The hairdresser—Jacqueline—gazed skeptically at Joyce’s face in the mirror in the little cubicle, playing with her hair, which she had let down from its pins, scrunching it up and then scraping it back. Jacqueline herself was pretty: blond and fine-boned and thin as a wraith, steely with repressed impatience.
—Madam’s face is quite square in shape. Are you sure you don’t want to go for something softer? If you want it short, how about a bubble cut? That suits an extrovert personality. It’s got more bounce to it than the elfin look.
Joyce stuck to her idea but felt nonetheless exposed and foolish. She imagined that Jacqueline picked up her hair with more disdain and brusqueness, once she knew she was not to be persuaded.
—I suppose we could put a few stand-up pin curls in on the crown, she said, making the best of a bad job. That might give it a bit of body.
One of the juniors brought a portable washbasin into the cubicle; it fastened into some kind of plumbing arrangement in the floor. Joyce needed to spend a penny (another thing she had not had time to think of, in her rush) and asked to be directed to the Ladies. As she crossed to the stairs behind the receptionist, dressed in her pink cape with her hair spread out on her shoulders, she happened to glance outside the window. You could see out through the drapes although you couldn’t see in.
Ray was walking down the street right in front of the salon.
Her first reaction was irritation, if anything at all, because this was not a part of the day when she had planned on having to be thinking about him. But there was no reason why he should not be walking down Green Street, which was only five minutes from the art college where he was working in his studio.
Then he paused, as if waiting for someone to catch up with him, and the someone who joined him and walked on with him—as if she might have stopped to look into a shop window for a moment, say—was Minkie, Minkie Gray, who was not only a girl who sometimes modeled for Ray and his students but was also one of their dinner guests for tonight.
Again, for a moment, nothing; and then the beginning of things.
Joyce carried on past the receptionist and up the stairs to the lavatory, which although perfectly clean was not in the same luxurious style as downstairs. She balanced just above the seat to pee as she always did (she knew Mrs. Mellor in the docks was wrong about catching babies from toilets, but doubtless there were other things you could catch), and was hit there with the first real shock of astonished disbelief, so that her legs trembled violently. She quickly pulled up her knickers and straightened her skirt and sat down hard on the closed lid.
Minkie had probably just been sitting for him and they were having a break and going to buy a cup of tea. Or he had been out on his own, perhaps getting that adapter plug he had promised to buy and kept forgetting, and had just bumped into Minkie. Or perhaps it could even be that Minkie had wanted to buy something for her, Joyce, to give her at the party tonight and had asked Ray to help her choose it. Strangely, though this last was the least likely explanation—apart from the improbability of anyone bringing anything more than flowers or maybe chocolates to a dinner party, Minkie never had any money anyway—it was the one that stuck in Joyce’s mind and soothed her the most. She could imagine as if it had already happened the flood of relief and gratitude she would feel when Minkie gave her whatever it was (a scarf? soap? sugared almonds?) and said in her arch little-girl way something about how she “almost had to drag old Mr. Grumpy Guts out with her to help her choose it, he was so cross at being disturbed.” Ray would frown irritatedly and complain to Joyce about her later. These were supposed to be the categories of emotion he felt about Minkie, if he thought about her at all: irritation and a kind of alarmed surprise at her silliness. Joyce could imagine him incandescent at her thinking fit to break in upon his precious work with such a trivial and typically female distraction. (A present indeed! What did Joyce need a present for?)
However, something in the way they had moved together, paused, and then moved on down Green Street made it seem to Joyce that Ray’s reactions to Minkie might need rethinking. Strangest of all was how they hadn’t spoken; she was sure (although as she played and replayed the scene over in her mind she became less sure) that as Minkie swung into step by his side and they resumed their journey down the hill, they had not done what you would expect acquaintances to do and bolstered their being together with interested and mutually accommodating talk. Even if Ray hadn’t been eager to talk, Minkie should have been. But they had simply swung into step together and moved off at one accord, quietly adjusted to each other without words.
Minkie was an odd-looking creature but certainly attractive. She had a cheeky freckled face with a turned-up nose, and a head of short dark loose curls; she dressed in eccentric art student clothes and played up the fact that she looked as if she ought to be buttoned into a red jacket as a pantomime boy. Joyce thought she had been wearing something like that on her way past the window just now, some kind of short military jacket with brass buttons from a jumble sale, although she couldn’t have sworn to it. Minkie was thin and flat-chested: Ray had said her breasts were “pancakes with cherries,” and that had stupidly made Joyce feel safe. It had been Joyce who suggested inviting Minkie to dinner tonight; she was always short of single women, and she had had some vague idea of pairing her up with the single man who was coming, John Lenier, one of Ray’s jazz friends. Ray had neither encouraged nor discouraged her over Minkie—he hadn’t seemed at all interested in the party—although he said something about her barking up the wrong tree with John Lenier. But then Joyce had only thought that men didn’t see these things the way women did.
Joyce pulled the chain and washed her hands and dried them on the pink roller towel. She checked her reflection in the mirror to reassure herself that no shock showed on her face; no, if anything she looked more remote and less flustered than she had been when she arrived. She waited until her legs had stopped the worst of the trembling and then went back downstairs to her cubicle, where Jacqueline plaited her hair, laid the cold steel of her scissors against the nape of her neck, and took the plait off in a couple of wide-jawed crunching bites. It lay in Joyce’s hands, still warm, known intimately to her and yet suddenly strange in its mix of pink and pale gold and ginger.
—It’s a lovely color, Jacqueline conceded, although it’s a difficult color to match with.
Joyce’s head felt light and free. All the time while the junior shampooed her, while Jacqueline chopped away at her hair with a blade set in something that looked like a Stanley knife, and then while she sat with her pin curls in a net under the dryer with cotton wool in her ears, reading a magazine, she felt this curious lightness. The two things seemed to her only equally important: important that her hair should turn out well, important that Ray should have some explanation for why he was on Green Street with Minkie. She didn’t speculate any further; she felt herself poised, for the moment, upon the brink of speculation. She wondered, almost, who the competent elegant-looking woman was who sat in the mirror opposite her, legs carelessly crossed, absorbed in her magazine. She looked as though she had a rich life, full of drama and fun and interesting friends.
—It does suit you, said Jacqueline, when she was combing out the curls, pushing them up with her fingers. Joyce thought Jacqueline saw her too, the suave cool-eyed woman with the easy elfin hairdo and the interesting life. Ever since she came down from the Ladies, her indifference to what was going on around her showing in her face, Jacqueline had treated her with more respect.
Joyce in her new hairdo looked experienced.
Not with the kind of experience her mother’s generation had, pressed down like a dark burden upon their shoulders. Th
is new generation wore it lightly and playfully, like a boy, simplified: free of all the old creaking corset-boned apparatus of women’s troubles.
She left to catch the bus home with the plait wrapped up in tissue, nestled in the dark at the bottom of her bag, weighing it down, even while her new head floated weightlessly on her new bare neck.
* * *
Minkie was late. dud mason and his wife penny and john Lenier were already there when she rang the bell, and they had opened the first bottle of Mateus Rosé wine.
The front door to the flat was down some steps off the drive; it opened onto a long passage floored with linoleum where they kept all their coats and Wellingtons and Ray’s bicycle and the push chair. The lavatory was at the far end of the passage, although everyone was supposed to keep the door shut so you couldn’t see straight in there from the entrance. Joyce had done her best with it, but the passage always made you feel drafty and rather dismal until you went through the glass door to one side and into the carpeted hall. When Joyce opened the front door, there really was a moment’s pause while she expected Minkie to hand her something: that present, soap or sweets or something, that she ought to have been buying when she was out with Ray. Ray hadn’t said anything yet about having seen Minkie earlier, although Joyce had made several opportunities for him to do so. It was dark outside, but the electric lantern above the door was switched on so she could see Minkie peering out palely from where she was swathed in some sort of man’s greatcoat several sizes too big for her. It had begun to rain; from the garden above there came an intimate pattering, drops burying themselves in the thick shrubs.
—I’m so sorry, pleaded Minkie in her baby voice, I’m late and I haven’t brought anything. I’m unforgivable. I really don’t deserve to be let in.
