by Tessa Hadley
Joyce laughed. She had a suddenly illuminated vision of how dreadful it must have been for Minkie to be asked to dinner tonight, under the circumstances. She could imagine how she must have struggled, trying to make up her mind whether to come or cry off, pretending she had a cold or something. She could imagine, too, how little help Ray had been. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he would have said tetchily. “Just tell her you’re busy or something.” Joyce really couldn’t have done any better if she had contrived the whole thing devilishly.
—Come on in, she said gaily. We don’t care how unforgivable you are. We’re already tipsy.
This was true. She was borne up by the wine swimming in her head; she wasn’t taking her usual care not to drink too much in case of spoiling the cooking. In the warm hall she helped Minkie out of the heavy wet coat; the dark curls were wet all over with tiny droplets of rain. Under the greatcoat she was wearing a sort of green embroidered sarong thing, wrapped tight and flat round her breasts, leaving her shoulders bare. It didn’t really work. Joyce could guess how at home in front of the mirror it had looked like a posture that Minkie could strike: extravagant and original and defiant. But actually it depended on that still posture in the mirror; once she had to move around in it she clearly felt self-conscious and foolish, as if she had dressed up for a part in the wrong play. Joyce in her understated gray dress had the advantage of her.
—I love your hair! cried Minkie. It really suits you.
—Do you? Yes, it was high time. I’d had enough of that silly old look. Come and get a drink.
The guests looked up hopefully toward them as they came into the lounge. Ray was holding forth to Dud about the Summerson Council, which had been set up the year before to report on and validate all the art education courses in the country. This subject touched a painful nerve, Joyce knew. He overreacted ferociously to the modernization the council was encouraging precisely because it galled him to be caught out on the other side, suddenly seeming to stand for traditional values in the face of the new art. He still thought of himself as the new art.
—So what do you think the latest is? he declaimed dramatically, stabbing with his pipe, standing with his legs apart and his back to the oil fire (keeping the warmth off everybody else). I go into the life room at the beginning of the new term, after the Christmas break, and all those beautiful old casts, all those exquisite Greek and Roman and Renaissance forms, are gone. Just gone. All at once after three thousand years they’re not in fashion. We’ve got nothing to learn from them anymore. I try to find out where they are, what’s happened to them. Nobody seems to know. It’s like a murder. I feel as if a murder’s taken place and everyone’s ashamed and nobody will talk about it. The bodies have been got rid of somehow. Did they break them up? I mean, did they actually stand there and hack them to pieces with a hammer? Or did they get poor old Bassett to do it? It would have broken his heart, that’s for sure.
—Minkie hasn’t brought any wine! Joyce announced. Shall we let her have a drink?
She thought she saw him falter for one instant, when he saw Minkie. He screwed up his face in an even more terrible frown.
—I’d like to say we’re in the hands of the barbarians, he shouted, but it’s worse than that. The barbarians at least have a beauty of their own. These people—these idiots, these absolute cretins—they don’t know what beauty is, even to hate it. They don’t know the difference between art and advertising.
—Ssh, said Joyce. Remember the Underwoods. (The Reverend sometimes banged on the floor with his stick if there was jazz or shouting.)
—It’s the beginning of the end of drawing, said Dud, who was easily made gloomy.
As if overcome, Ray went to change the music on the gramophone, making a show of the delicate care with which he handled the records in and out of their paper sleeves. Predictably, he put on something that Joyce didn’t like, something squeaky and fast and frantic, Mingus probably. This was obviously the part he was going to play tonight: the tormented artist unable because of the scale and purity of his feelings to put on a social show as other people could. There had been a time when Joyce was in awe of him in that vein. He had the same focused glow as when he was working; it gave an edge of concentration to his shambling looks: untidy soft hair he wouldn’t get cut often enough and fleshy pouchy face, like an angel gone to seed. (He was thickening around the waist too; he would have to watch that. With his short legs it wouldn’t suit him.)
She thought their guests already sensed something was wrong. Penny, who was very pregnant, sat guiltily at the edge of her seat as if she felt herself accused of breaking up plaster casts. John Lenier looked as if he was hoping for an opportunity to come in with something funny, to make them all laugh and defuse the gloomily denunciatory mood. He’d probably never even heard of the Summerson Council and couldn’t care less.
—Of course Minkie can have a drink. John leapt to his feet. I’ll pour it for her. What would she like?
Joyce decided that John would be her ally for the night. She liked him anyway. He was tall and lean and took life lightly. With his silky gray hair (prematurely gray; he was only in his twenties, like her) he made Joyce think of a graceful poplar turning up its leaves in the breeze. His cream-colored polo neck was just the sort of thing she wished Ray would wear. He told her what a lovely room this was, what subtle colors she had chosen, and admired her dress and her hair. When he handed Minkie her glass of Mateus he said she looked in her green sarong as if she might dance for them later. Minkie was grateful, but Joyce was pleased that he had felt the need to be kind and rescue the silly sarong and give it a reason for existence.
* * *
Joyce burnt the toast that was supposed to go with the terrine. Also, the creamed potatoes had lumps because she couldn’t be bothered to mash them vigorously enough, and the beef olives were overcooked, and some of the sauce had burned on the bottom of the frying pan. She was completely indifferent to the food, slopping it out carelessly on the plates, eating it without tasting it. She had promised herself for days, in return for starving herself, a portion of chocolate cream pudding, but when it came out of the fridge she didn’t even want any. Only Dud and Minkie ate it.
They had all got riotously drunk somehow. They weren’t used to drinking much these days, and John Lenier had brought a bottle of vodka as well as two bottles of Black Tower. Penny slipped away from the table quite early on and fell asleep on the sofa in the lounge. It wasn’t quite clear whether they were having a fantastic time or whether it was a dreadful disaster. At certain points they were all screaming with laughter, as if everything anyone said was exceptionally miraculously funny, although Joyce could never remember afterward any of their jokes that night, only Dud coming back from the lavatory wearing one of the children’s balaclavas he had picked up from a coat hook in the passage. After that everyone who went came back wearing something until the kitchen floor was cluttered with sou’westers and gloves and umbrellas and Zoe’s scooter (the children were mystified and delighted to find these things in the morning).
At other points, on the contrary, Joyce was suddenly given a vision of their party as a hellhole, a Bosch-like slithering charnel nastiness, where she and Ray exchanged in naked moments a look like a rictus of loathing, seeing down to the very bottom of each other’s obscenely motivated souls. Then it seemed as if what was happening was something so awful and so utterly unlike anything that had ever happened before that in the morning when they were sober they would no longer be able to live together ever again.
Dud told Joyce in low tones (once he was sure Penny was asleep) how he had loved her at art school.
—You remember those little folded cards we had with our timetables on? Every time I knew you were going to be in a lesson, I wrote JS in tiny letters in the corner, on that square.
This was gratifying but familiar territory, and Joyce knew where it led: Dud with his arm around her, or pressing his bear bulk against her under the table, mumbling mournfully ab
out how she was a very special person. Then he would be blushing and full of mawkish contrition when he met her next, hoping she wouldn’t say anything to Penny. She fended him off; it was John she was intent upon. They seemed to be getting on very well, whispering about the others, exchanging ironic looks, he confiding his hopes for a career in photography while she—the words came in her head—“she took a charming interest.” He was full of praise for the beautiful food, although she noticed he left one of his beef olives and stubbed a cigarette out on the plate. He kissed her hand once and held on to it for a few moments, pretending to guess her perfume; she was shocked by the thudding excitement with which her whole body responded to the little game. When she pulled her hand out of his cool silvery grip, he slid his thumb suggestively along her palm; involuntarily she imagined them kissing lips, playing with tongues.
Ray was explaining to Minkie in belligerently insistent detail how if you were drawing the docks you had to begin drawing at the bottom of the steps when the tide was out and then you could move your drawing farther up as the tide came in.
—I don’t understand it, said Minkie miserably, but it doesn’t matter.
—But why don’t you understand it? It’s very simple. An idiot could understand it. You begin at the bottom, when the tide is out.…
Then there was a time when Minkie was lying sobbing on the bed in Ray and Joyce’s bedroom, although it wasn’t ostensibly about the docks, it was because Dud had been describing to her the diseased eyes he was paid to draw for the medical records at the hospital, and although she had told him this was making her feel sick, he wouldn’t stop. Joyce said she was going to check on the children (presumably the children were asleep; perhaps she really did open their door and look in on them, although she had no memory of it), and then she walked into the bedroom, singing a song of her mother’s that used to make her cry when she was a little girl. The bedroom light was off but she could see in the light from the hall behind.
All in the merry month of May
When green buds were a-swellin’,
Young Jimmy Groves on his deathbed lay
For love of Barbara Allen.
All slowly slowly there she came,
And slowly she came nigh him.
And all she said when there she came:
Young lad, I think you’re dyin’.
She had a poor singing voice; she had no idea where the plan came from, with its cardboard-theatrical threat so unlike her usual brisk daytime self. Minkie stopped sobbing and gazed at her with eyes that were swimming in tears and fearful. She lay with one arm flung out across the bedcover; on her wrist was a thick bangle of polished wood. Joyce was convinced all at once that this had been a present to Minkie from Ray, worn tonight for good luck or in defiance.
—I’ll take that, I think, she said, and slipped it off the girl’s limp unresisting hand. D’you mind?
Minkie dumbly shook her head.
(Did she put the bangle on and wear it back to where the others were still shouting and laughing? The next day she found it among the dirty dishes in the kitchen; she took it with her when she went with Daniel out for a walk on the heath and dropped it into a litter bin among the sweet wrappers and lolly sticks, although it was a lovely thing, a shame to lose it.)
At some other point that evening they were all talking about Mary Anderson. When she was at college with Dud and Joyce she was an odd-looking girl with elderly parents and thick pebble glasses, under which her eyelashes grew long and luxuriant as if in a greenhouse. Now she was making a name for herself as a painter.
—I remember I told her to go to the Dubuffet exhibition in ’fifty-nine, said Ray. That’s what you can see in these latest paintings, that sort of inspired graffiti. The Dubuffet set free something in her imagination. That’s what they don’t understand, these idea men: that you can be free, and yet paint in a tradition.
—Because she can draw, said Dud. Even though they aren’t naturalistic forms, it’s there, the truth in the pencil.
Joyce envied Mary, for those minutes, desolatingly.
—But would you want to go to bed with her? she laughed.
She couldn’t believe, the moment she’d said it, that she was capable of anything so stupid. She and Ray stared at each other; she imagined that their pupils were dilated like cats’, gaping blackness.
—I would, said Ray. She’s mysterious.
—Mysterious? What’s mysterious? You didn’t use to think that. That just means ugly. You’re just impressed because she’s somebody now.
—Yes, I suppose I am. It’s something, that she’s somebody.
—You men! she exclaimed, flinging her arm in a grand gesture of disgust, knocking over a glass. Although after all it was she who had said the stupid thing, who had lowered everything to the personal, sexual question.
* * *
Eventually the reverend underwood came thundering at the front door knocker in his pajamas and dressing gown. He and Ray engaged in a shouted argument while the guests, half relieved at being shaken out of the evening’s dark tangle, hurriedly got their things together and made subdued farewells.
—Thanks for a lovely time, whispered Penny, snugly rounded, blinking from her innocent sleep. I’m sorry I’ve missed all the fun. Dudley loves coming here.
Usually after their dinner parties Joyce and Ray cleared up in fatigued companionable silence, moving coordinatedly around each other under her command, piling up plates and emptying ashtrays. Tonight Joyce gave one shuddering look at the mess; her bones ached and her head swam and she was nauseated. She was incapable of restoring order. She didn’t even want to. While the front door was still open and Ray was saying goodbye to John and Minkie, she clambered out of her clothes in the half-dark bedroom, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and lay down on her back in the bed in her baby-doll short nightdress, keeping still as a statue, staring at the ceiling, listening to Ray padding round the rooms, turning the lights off, checking at the children’s door.
She knew that when he came to bed he would want to make love to her; his heart would be pounding from his furious quarrel with the Reverend Underwood and he would want calming down. She waited for him like a stone, promising herself to endure it as unforgivingly as if she were having an examination at the doctor’s. It seemed to her that if she could just keep her mouth closed on this silence she would be punishing him, holding on to what he didn’t know she knew, even though it lay huge and heavy in her head. She was quite sure he hadn’t an idea that she had guessed. He would have to wait for Minkie to tell him (women were so much better at these things), and she imagined that even then, even when he came to her with big dog eyes full of contrition, wanting to explain, she would refuse to speak about it to him.
—Should I put the leftovers in the fridge? he asked, standing in the doorway, aggrieved at having to do her chores; he thought she’d flaked out on him because she was tipsy.
—Put them wherever you want.
For another few minutes she heard him banging things ill-temperedly around in the kitchen; then he came and climbed into bed and, after a bit, reached out and touched her breast, which was their sign. Obediently she got up and put in her cap in the bathroom.
—Only if you’d like to, he said.
—I don’t mind.
She lay as if she were an effigy on a tomb. He labored on top of her, and she pressed her nails into her palm because it was disgusting and thought the words “his hairy rump,” although that wasn’t fair, he wasn’t particularly hairy. Toward the end she pretended, and stirred about a bit, just to get it over. She thought she only wanted him to fall asleep and leave her alone to think. At the same time she felt so sad, and even ashamed, that the thing that had been so transforming and incandescent between them could have become as diminished and miserable as this.
His climax, though, groaning and collapsing on top of her, affected her as unpredictably if he’d released a spring: not of sexuality but of rage. As he rolled off her she pushed away fr
om him and leaped out of the bed.
—I’m off, she said. I’m going.
He propped himself up on his elbows, startled out of postcoital relaxation.
—What do you mean? What’s the matter?
—I’m going. How could you?
—How could I what? You said you didn’t mind.
She went into the bathroom and washed herself in cold water and then dressed, though not in the gray dress; she felt herself trampling that under her feet as she moved backward and forward in the room, choosing slacks and a striped cotton top from her drawers, pulling a comb through her hair, picking up to take with her in her handbag a change of knickers and her toothbrush and makeup bag and perfume.
Ray by this time was standing uselessly beside the bed; he had put on his pajama bottoms for decorum’s sake.
—What’s going on here? What’s all this about?
—I’m going, she said. Where does John Lenier live?
—Jesus Christ, Joyce, what are you talking about? You’re making a terrible mistake.
—I’m talking about M-i-n-k-i-e. Someone who was here tonight. Some nice little cream pancake with cherries on top. But two can play at that game. Don’t bother to tell me where he lives. I’ll take the address book.
* * *
She didn’t know how much it was really about john lenier.
There was no doubt that, as she left the house and hurried through the dark windy night to the telephone box (John’s address wasn’t in the book but his telephone number was), she was full of a sexual excitement focused on him. She wasn’t imagining that she would take much time telling him how she felt about Ray and Minkie; all that was needed was a bare explanation of the need to make up for everything that had been spoiled in her bed just now. Her rage was a license: her mind feverishly threw up fragments of scenes with John—his grateful astonishment, his hesitating and at first elaborately courteous advances, that languorous delicate alertness of his applied to her, bent over her, minutely responsive to her pleasures, taking his own with an exquisiteness she intuited in him. More, too: other things flashed in her mind’s eye, an accelerating daring, initiations into new things (she wasn’t specific as to quite what new things), an open-eyed consent to some definitive crossing into adult territory. It was high time, she thought, that she grew up.
