Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

  If John had been another man, the night might have had a very different outcome: the things dreamed up in fantasy might have taken on solid form, everything from then on might have turned out differently.

  On the other hand, as soon as she knew he wasn’t going to play the part she had imagined for him, his importance fell away as if it had never existed, releasing her into a kind of calm and disclosing her real situation in a new perspective. Perhaps she knew she had made a mistake as soon as she spoke to him in the phone box, her whole body shaking so profoundly in time to her heart’s thumping that it even distorted her voice; the box meanwhile was being buffeted from outside, gusts of wind rattling twigs against the glass.

  —It’s Joyce, she said. Something’s happened. I need to talk to you. Can I come round?

  At least he didn’t sound as if she’d woken him from sleep; he was sober and careful.

  —Joyce? Oh, dear. Well, of course you can. Where’s Ray? Wouldn’t you rather that I came to you? I could easily pop my things on.

  —Oh, no. It’s easy now. I’m already out; I don’t want to go back. Just tell me how to get to where you live.

  She thought he’d offer to come out and find her; instead, after a moment’s thought he gave her precise directions to his address. (It wasn’t far, a ten-minute walk, a few streets away.) The real man, of course, was never going to be as obediently pliant to her desires as his simulacrum in her fantasy; it was understandable that he responded guardedly to this casual party flirtation returned upon him, rawly exacting. No wonder, even, that he wanted to know about Ray; husbands begin to count when things get serious. Nonetheless, something in his voice cooled her and warned her off, so that by the time he opened his door to her ten minutes later in the red silk paisley dressing gown that somehow suddenly made everything come clear—he might almost have put it on to help explain—she was all ready for her disillusion. The dressing gown gave it away like a piece of crude stage machinery signaling a point; even to her, who had been so obtuse, so sure of her command of the way things were, so oblivious to essential missing pieces of information. This must have been what Ray was trying to tell her while she was busily planning, first, to have John for Minkie, then for herself.

  It was simply never mentioned after that between her and John: the possibility that she had come to him in hopes of something rather more than the clean handkerchief and cocoa he considerately provided, or that he might have ever had to deliver up to her the awkward explanation of why he would not be able to play his part in her revenge. Instead, awareness of all this hovered with an effect of high comedy between them and made them get on rather well, as if they had been together through some danger narrowly skirted. Even though she poured out her story to him, crying copiously into his handkerchief, and told him things she had never spoken of to anyone else about the difficulty of living with Ray, and even though John consoled her so tactfully with his calm estimate of the unimportance of what had happened, nothing that they said to each other seemed completely serious. At some point the conversation even turned to her admiration of the way he’d done his flat, which was all black and white with a spatter of bright colors in the cushions and rugs.

  —He doesn’t really like her much, said John, thinking back over his impressions from the evening. I’d never have had any idea of anything between them, if you hadn’t told me.

  —No, he doesn’t like her much. He thinks she’s silly.

  —Well, bless her, she is, rather.

  —Don’t bless her. I want to tear her hair and scratch her eyes out.

  —No, you don’t. She’s a daft little girl who thinks it’s clever to pout and play baby. She isn’t even worth wasting your anger on. She’s a little shallow pond and you’re a lake, a deep still lake, just a little bit ruffled on the surface for the moment.

  —Oh, John, you’re so nice to me. I only wish I believed that Ray thought that.

  —He’s not an idiot, is he? Don’t you think he knows it? Look, what you need is to get some beauty sleep, go home, forget about making any ugly scenes. He knows you know; you don’t need to say anything more. Just be your gorgeous self, make yourself look like the sophisticated glamorous woman you are, cook him one of your wonderful meals, put on the lamps and the music, take the time to sit down and talk with him about painting or whatever, and don’t you think he’ll put some important questions to himself about why he’s been playing around? D’you think he wants to sit down and talk about art with Minkie? Maybe it’s been difficult for him, with the children. Maybe things haven’t been everything they used to be, between you. Buy yourself some gorgeous new underwear and some perfume and make him fall for you all over again.

  —Oh, I know I could do that, she said, frowning.

  —Well, of course you could.

  —I don’t know whether it’s what I want to do.

  Eventually John brought a pillow and sheets and blankets and made up a bed for her on his sofa, where she fell almost instantly asleep, with no idea what time of day or night it was, except that it was still dark.

  * * *

  When she woke she could just make out the shapes of objects in the room in a gray dawn light. Her head felt clear, she was perfectly well, she must have worked right through the terrible hangover that surely had been in store for her in all the excitement of the night before: her escape into the dark, her tears, and her pouring out of all her troubles. These had used up all the poison in her.

  She woke thinking about Ray: not about Minkie and all the stuff from last night, but about his work. His latest paintings, for the last eighteen months or so, had been something new. He was putting the paint on more smoothly, and if you drew your attention away from the surface details of the brushwork, you could suddenly see revealed a glimpse of likeness, verisimilitude, as if under the necessary play of the paint he had trapped a shadow of the real presence. Joyce knew that this mixture of an expressionistic style with some of the devices of illusionism was an eccentric and original technique, and she knew what a practiced virtuoso handling of the paint was required to produce such a complex effect. The other thing he had changed was the way he arranged the bodies on the canvas, his new cramped picture space with body parts improbably crowded together. Some of the new nudes had startled and unsettled Joyce when she first saw them: he had asked the model to take a contorted position, legs apart, genitalia brutally exposed and foregrounded, the model perhaps looking out from the picture with her head almost upside down, twisted under her knee. The models could only hold these contortions while he made quick sketches. When he worked the sketches up into paintings, he didn’t square the drawings up as he used to do; he copied freehand and exaggerated the distortions and the improbability.

  These were beautiful pictures, Joyce was sure of that. She knew she was able to make an objective estimate of his work because she also had an uncanny instinct for when his paintings failed, which came from knowing him so well, recognizing when he was weak or false or trying to cover up something he couldn’t do. These new ones frightened her, but they weren’t ugly. They looked unflinchingly deep into the layered appearances of flesh, seeing things that were true. She trusted him, not personally but objectively, that he was able to see the truth: not in their daily life, when he was often wrong, but beyond it. She could see it when it worked, the translation of the truth of life into pictures, but she couldn’t do it for herself. My love for him rests on that, she thought. Everything rests on that.

  It had been awhile now since she had modeled for him; he had made some drawings of her pregnant with Daniel, and afterward breast-feeding him, but because of the children there simply wasn’t time these days for her to sit for long enough. She had even been glad that it had stopped; there had seemed to be something irreconcilable between her two roles, as the effective manager of his domestic life and as the still mute object of his study, on whom he concentrated, but as if she wasn’t there. Sessions with him weren’t necessarily calm or good-tempered, either; if he was
struggling, scraping off paint or screwing up drawings, she used to feel responsible, drained by the intensity of his effort but helpless to make it work, angry with his anger because it seemed self-indulgent, not directed at real things. Now she was sorry; she wanted that discomfort back. She thought that perhaps Minkie had modeled for one of those searing nudes, exposed and altered by his scrutiny.

  How had she imagined that this man might be chastely domesticated, on her terms? She had hung his pictures in her home as if she could gloss over what was inside the frame and use it as a sign of taste merely, to hang among other signs, curtains and lamps and interesting objects from the junk shops.

  Joyce cleaned her teeth and washed her face in John’s bathroom (lucky that she had brought her toothbrush), surprised and pleased by her reflection in his mirror with its new short hair.

  She should go back.

  Perhaps if she went now she might even get there before the children woke up.

  * * *

  She let herself into the flat with her key. probably the Underwoods heard her coming back just as they must have heard her leave last night (she always imagined them side by side in a vast mahogany bed, listening from under some sort of overhanging ecclesiastical ornamentation), but she didn’t care. All was quiet. She thought Ray would probably be asleep; she would embark on the clearing up and then make breakfast for him and percolate real coffee when he woke up. She slipped off her shoes and crossed quietly to their bedroom in her stocking feet; the door was slightly open, as they always left it, so as to hear the children if they cried out in the night.

  Ray was sitting in all his clothes at the window, where it was becoming light, and day outside: a tentative spring day under veiled blue skies, meek after the tantrums of last night, smelling of the soaked earth of gardens (she was exhilaratedly saturated in it as he couldn’t yet be, from her walk home through the early streets where she met only the milkman). When he saw her in the doorway he jumped up off the wooden chair where she usually piled her clothes at night.

  —Hello. You can’t have been very comfortable, she said.

  —I wasn’t. He hesitated. Did you mean the chair? Or about—things?

  She laughed. Both of them were using subdued undertones, so as not to wake Daniel. Zoe was a lie-abed, but Daniel was an early bird, usually first calling to them from his cot around six or half past.

  —Both, probably.

  —Well, no. No to both.

  —What are you doing up? You’ll be exhausted.

  He looked at her suspiciously.

  —Have you been asleep, then?

  —After my night of torrid passion.

  —Was it? His voice cracked somewhat.

  —What do you think?

  He was exaggeratedly relieved, flinging his arms up as if he had kept them by his sides in a tension of suspense.

  —I was beginning to wonder. I did try to tell you.

  —You didn’t try all that hard.

  —Is it funny?

  She smothered her giggles in her hands.

  —Probably. When you come to think about it. My crazy fling. A trip to the moon, on gossamer wings. Have you been sitting there all night?

  —Waiting for you. But not all night. I cleared up.

  —Oh, you didn’t. Not all on your own? How awful!

  —It was awful. Not the clearing up. An awful night.

  —I know. Listen.

  But she didn’t know at first what she had to say. She crossed the room to where he stood and stopped just a few inches in front of him, so that they could feel each other’s body warmth rolling off them in the cold morning and taste each other’s breath, hers minty, his stale and boozy. His clothes from the night before were crumpled and his hair was disheveled and his face pasty and gray around the jowls with stubble. It seemed a comically appropriate atonement, that he had kept his dismal vigil while she slept those hours away at John’s as easefully as an angel.

  Ray put his hands up to take her shoulders, but she caught them in hers and held him off.

  —I don’t want any lying, she said.

  He shook his head mutely.

  —Not from either of us, I mean. Not from me either, about what I feel. It makes me want to kill you, when I know you’ve slept with her. It makes me feel desperate and helpless. I don’t know what to do.

  —It didn’t mean anything.

  —No, it did, it did. That’s just what I don’t want you to say. It did mean something.

  —OK, it meant something. He shrugged. But not what you think.

  —I don’t know what I think. What did it mean?

  —I suppose it was just sex. How can I put it? However I put it, I’m in the wrong, don’t think I don’t know that.

  —Don’t talk about wrong and right. I don’t want us to be together because of the old rule book.

  —I see.

  —And that was a lie already. Coming from you. “Just sex.” That word “just” is a lie, to hide its importance from me.

  He searched her face, to see how much he could say.

  —All right, that was a lie. I was obsessed with her for a short while. Perhaps a month or so. The idea of her devoured me. Now I can’t imagine why, it’s so thoroughly over.

  Joyce flinched; she was shocked; she felt a rich pulse of blood in her heart.

  —“Devoured you.”

  —You asked me.

  —I almost can’t bear that, that the idea of her devoured you.

  —It’s men, he tried to explain. This is how it takes us sometimes. I’m so sorry. It seems such a cheap trick, now I’m having to put it into words. I can’t even believe, myself, that it ever seemed important.

  —How many times, exactly, precisely, did you make love to her? Don’t lie, whatever you do.

  He had to mentally count them, humbled and blushing, and she stared at his eyes as if she might catch in there some flicker of the pictures he summoned up.

  —Six? Yes, I think six.

  —And was it good? Tell the truth.

  —How am I supposed to answer that, to you?

  —But answer it.

  —At first, it was good. He sighed. Then I got tired of her; she got on my nerves. Don’t think I don’t feel like a swine.

  —I don’t want to contain you, Joyce said, after a pause. I don’t want to be your lock and key.

  —Sometimes it feels to a man, he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if women want to make the world sweet. Are you going to be angry if I say this? But it’s not sweet. And it’s sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything’s going to be all right, everything’s nice.

  —Is this sex we’re talking about here?

  —It’s partly sex. Yes, I suppose it is. And freedom, not getting all tangled up in sweet things, being able to slip the rope sometimes.

  —Well, I might want that too, she said.

  —Might you? He was startled.

  —I might. Didn’t that occur to you?

  His face was full of trepidation.

  —Are we talking about freedom? I don’t know, it’s not the same—freedom—for men and women. Just biologically, even. Say I’d been wrong, last night, about John. I don’t know whether I could deal with that: you, with another man.

  —You would just have to, she said. Maybe. If that’s how we’re going to manage things.

  —I see. I see what you’re getting at.

  She let him hold her by the shoulders, then, gripping tightly.

  There was so much more for them to say and to sort out.

  But at that moment, like a bird piping, the baby sang out from behind the bars of his cot.

  * * *

  Needless to say, there was plenty of clearing up left to do. Ray’s idea of a tidy room was not the same as hers. He had done his best, but he had no idea where most things went, or how to deal with the dirty pans, or how to wrap up the things that needed to be stored in the fridge. And he hadn’t been able to use the vacuum in the middle of
the night. (Goodness knows what the Underwoods even made of his running the hot water.) She sent Ray back to bed to sleep (“Daddy’s got a bit of a headache”) and set about seeing to all this, as well as preparing the children’s breakfast and getting them dressed and making the beds and rinsing Daniel’s nappies and putting them on to boil; and all with an exultant lightness, nursing a secret and liberating excitement like a teenager who’s been kissed and carries the feel of it around all day on her skin. Every time she had to pass the closed door of the bedroom, she was aware of Ray in there as if he were an adventure that awaited her.

  Then the tiredness hit her, like a cosh, at about eleven, when she put Daniel down for his nap and took the chocolate pudding out from the fridge and helped herself to a big bowlful (her diet seemed trivial, compared to what was happening in her marriage). When she had eaten it, she felt sick and thought she might lie down on the sofa to snatch some sleep for half an hour before she began to prepare the Sunday dinner. Zoe would be all right, Nana Deare had taught her to knit, and she was practicing. It was true that she couldn’t turn round at the end of a row, so that every ten minutes she had to come to Joyce to put the needles back into her hands facing the other way; but Joyce was sure she would be able to do that in her sleep.

  As soon as she closed her eyes she remembered the plait of hair, which had lain forgotten in its tissue paper in the bottom of her handbag ever since she came home from the hairdresser’s. It seemed somehow disrespectful to leave it there unregarded any longer; even risky, although she didn’t know exactly what was at risk, except that the hair left for too long washing around in the depths of the bag might pick up bits of lint and dirt from the loose coins. So she stood up again, crossed the hall, opened the bedroom door, signing to Zoe to keep quiet, then tiptoed cautiously into the half-dark. The curtains were closed, the room smelled fustily of sleep, the hump of her husband snored from under the blankets pulled up over his head. Her handbag was still where she had put it down when she came in from her failed attempt at adultery early that morning. With an odd sense of enacting something like a ceremony, she pulled open her underwear drawer, lifted the plait from her bag, sinuous and suggestive in its crinkling paper, and buried it at the back of the drawer under all the layers of her things.