by Tessa Hadley
Joyce was always brisk these days. She was always busy, to begin with. It was she who built the shelf units for the lounge, hair tied up in a scarf, working with a saw and a spirit level, scribbling calculations, hinging the louvered doors. Or she was on her knees, scrubbing off the stripper from the floorboards in the kitchen; or she was tiling and grouting in the new bathroom. Ray was shut out from her confabulations with the builder, Mike, their faces absorbed and rapt with costing and planning. It was awful that she had assigned to Ray the most splendid room of the house as his studio. He wanted to give it back and retreat in relief to the old inadequate space at the college he had complained about for so many years, but he didn’t dare. The new studio was so tall and white and absurdly expectant of great things from him that he found himself in reaction painting tinier and tinier pictures, book-sized, postcard-sized (he forbade himself to go any smaller).
Joyce had become beautiful in a way Ray had not calculated for; flamboyant, perming her hair into thick waves, flaunting her backside in tight white trousers and her front in clinging T-shirts or low-cut filmy blouses in psychedelic colors. He prowled after the baffling, arousing woman she had become around a home that seemed to be always full of other people. He would find Joyce closeted clandestinely with her Uncle Dick in his policeman’s overcoat and graying film-star war-hero good looks. (Their meetings were clandestine because Dick’s new wife—not the woman he’d left Aunt Vera for—wasn’t all that much older than Joyce and didn’t like him to have anything to do with his previous family.) Ray had no idea why Joyce gave Dick house room, let alone ladling out her homemade flapjacks and perked coffee and all the sweetness of her engaged attention for him as if she were hungry for his approval. When he left he stuffed a five-pound note into her apron or her pocket and she cried over it. Ray kept out of the way in case Dick tried to advise him on tongue-and-groove paneling or the purchase of taps (he didn’t seem able to discuss such matters with a woman).
Joyce had to make elaborate arrangements so that Dick wouldn’t run into Vera; since she retired from teaching she had also taken to popping round. (“We have to have her,” Joyce assured him. “Why do you think Pete took himself off to the other side of the world?”) Vera was engaged in self-improvement, taking Russian classes, cycling over the heath for exercise. She enrolled at the university Extra-Mural Department for a course on The Nude in Art and hovered in an agony of indecision between being proud of her relationship to a successful painter and appalled at what he painted. “It’s not that I’m a prude, Ray,” she said. “It’s just that you make it all look so ugly.” Or sometimes the kitchen would be overflowing with women unknown to Ray, frantic as an aviary with their high-pitched chattering. As if she didn’t have enough else to do, Joyce had taken it upon herself to organize a craft cooperative, selling goods on a stall in the covered market. The kitchen table would be piled with pots, peg dolls, felt mice, prints, batik tea cosies, greeting cards made of pressed flowers, macramé hangings for plant pots. Joyce worked out the rotas and manned the stall two days a week. She sewed patchwork jackets and waistcoats in the evenings while she watched telly, and was voracious for scraps; she had her scissors into his old shirts and ties sometimes before he’d even worn them out.
From time to time in his flight around the house, Ray stumbled in some quiet spot upon Fiona, Zoe’s little friend, and they exchanged complicit glances, as if neither of them had any very good reason to be there. Fiona had had her hair done in what Zoe impatiently informed him was a feather cut: short, with long ends trailing down the nape of her neck. With her head freed and her eyes with their deep steady gaze exposed, she looked like a rough little waif from a Dutch genre painting. She wore blue eye shadow and plucked her eyebrows into a quizzical arch; she had stayed small, while Zoe grew taller and more awkwardly skinny.
—Fiona’s such an attractive girl, said Joyce. I’d love to dress her. It’s a pity about the dreadful way she does her eyes.
—I like them, said Ray. The eyes are exactly what I like.
—Do you really? You wouldn’t let Zoe do it.
—Wouldn’t I? Anyway, it wouldn’t suit her. But Fiona’s a sharp little kid. I like her; I’m glad Zoe’s got all sorts of friends. Some of those Amery-James types are pretty ghastly. I see them parading out when I pick her up. How come the private schools get more than their fair share of the ugly ones?
Ray persuaded Fiona to sit for him. She stepped warily the first time into the empty white space of the studio (she couldn’t be any warier of it than he was), but she made an excellent model, keeping obediently still for longer than he had thought possible at her age, not self-conscious, not wanting to talk. Zoe visited them suspiciously with coffees and biscuits, explaining to her friend that Ray always made things “look funny,” and she mustn’t expect much. He did two paintings (small ones) of Fiona in the buttoned-up Crombie with a triangle of red handkerchief sticking out of its pocket, which apparently was de rigeur for skinheads. He made her face a funny crumpled shape like a little intelligent dog, staring knowingly out of the frame without smiling; in one of the paintings she held a cigarette tight between fingers curled into a fist.
—You’re not supposed to know I smoke, she said, when she gave the picture her coolly appraising stare. He thought she liked it.
He took her hand (stubby, not beautiful) and unfurled her yellow fingers to show her how he guessed.
* * *
Something crumbled slowly in zoe’s fixed idea of things. The yearning that had been for a lost past swung into a different, present, plane; she began responding to the idea of “ordinary people” with the same vibration of romance that had once thrilled at “olden days.” She told girls at school that she was a Communist, although she had only a vague idea of what that might involve. She knew it was defiant; she knew communism, which her father spoke about with a tender but wary excitement, envisaged an order of things that would do away with the game of advantage as played at Amery-James. Ray and Joyce used “anticommunist” as a disparaging critique of certain kinds of things that were said on the news; there was a hopefulness, a moving optimism about human possibilities, in believing that the communist countries were probably much better than some people wanted you to think. When there was a general election in her third year, she was proud of driving up to school in Ray’s shabby old Cortina with Labour stickers in the back window.
Fiona wasn’t getting on very well with her mother. Jean had left Brights and was working in a café making greasy breakfasts; she complained that she couldn’t get the smell of frying out of her clothes or her hair. She was still pretty, although she was putting on weight around her waist and her complexion was muddier. She always asked Zoe how she was getting on at school. When Zoe said she was thinking of changing to Langham Road, Jean gave her a sharp look, almost as if she’d seen through with contempt to some effort of Zoe’s to ingratiate herself.
—What would you want to go to that dump for? You should think yourself lucky, at the grammar school.
—She’s a bleeding liability, said Fiona, upstairs in Zoe’s bedroom, tapping an Embassy Regal out of her packet with one hand in a deft habituated movement. Zoe didn’t smoke, out of fear that she’d make a mess of it. Humbly she brought ashtrays. According to Fiona, Jean’s latest boyfriend was “the strong and silent type.”
—So silent, he’s only learned about twenty words, and most of them aren’t very nice. She has to account to him for where she is every moment of the day, or he starts breaking the place up. I can’t wait to get out of there and get somewhere of my own, I honestly can’t.
Zoe registered this grown-up proposition with a lurch of awe: the time for her to leave behind her room in the family house seemed to belong in some era of the remote future.
—What about your dad, she wondered shyly. Have you ever thought about going to stay with him?
—Oh, him. Fiona gave her a look. No, thank you: not unless I wanted to spend my life in a pub and live on fish and chips.
In many ways this was the most intimate period of their relationship. Fiona confided in Zoe as she never had before.
—I want to stay on at school, she said. I want to get good qualifications. I’d like to study languages and be one of those secretaries who work doing translations or stuff. I’m going to go to London, get myself a flat.
They spent some time then going into the details of how they would decorate their flats. Zoe had visited a friend of her mother’s in a tiny mews apartment in central London, painted in white and turquoise, with a table that let down from the wall on a rope and a bathtub in the kitchen that covered with a board to make a work surface. Both of them were entranced by the idea of this. All Fiona’s plans seemed possible to Zoe. Fiona would know how to manage these things—dashing to work on the tube in the mornings, growing perfect nails with half-moon cuticles, shopping for tea for one—as Zoe never would. In elegant midiskirts and black patent leather boots, she would look like the models in the fashion magazines, with their mournful faces full of initiated knowledge.
—And the one thing for certain I don’t want is some cretinous boyfriend glooming around in the background, said Fiona with puritan zeal, and Zoe earnestly agreed.
* * *
The girls were paid to help out sometimes with joyce’s parties. Joyce would work herself into a frenzy of preparation, cleaning and cooking. The house had to look like a dream of its perfect self: the tall light rooms with their floor-length windows, the wrought-iron balcony laden with pots of flowers, huge rice-paper lampshades, walls hung with paintings and drawings and huge tarnished old mirrors in crumbling gilt frames, rough North African blankets and Joyce’s patchwork cushions heaped up together on the low white sofa. The production of the dream was grim sweating effort; Joyce, her hair wrapped in a scarf, rapped out her orders according to a meticulously prepared plan of attack. When the dusting and polishing and vacuuming was done, the food (which she would have been getting ready for days) had to be arranged on the huge pine kitchen table: bowls of tomato and bean salads set out, parsley finely chopped, the home-baked ham sliced, the lemon fridge cake cut, paper napkins layered between all the plates.
Fiona had the right deft touch for all this; Joyce delegated to her and praised her “good design sense.” Zoe was given the easier jobs, like mixing chives in the potato salad, where it didn’t matter if things looked a mess. She asked whether Jean might be invited to the party. Whenever the two mothers met, Joyce was obliviously condescending, and Zoe, watching, saw that Jean kept a private reserve of skeptical dislike behind the awkward appreciative noises at “the lovely house” and “all your artistic things.” She longed to repair this breach.
—I’m not really sure she would fit in, darling, said Joyce doubtfully.
Anyway, Fiona wouldn’t hear of it.
“The party” loomed in anticipation, the capacious repository of hopes and imaginings: anything was possible. There was a joy in being part of the team behind the scenes, working in coordination, haunted by the idea of the crowd that would fill up the expectant spaces. They talked of the guests in tones at once slavishly subordinate and derisory. “They’re bound to put wineglasses down on the polished surfaces.” “What sort of time d’you think we should make coffee? Otherwise they’ll just go on and on drinking.” “Put ashtrays everywhere. Some of them will stub out their cigarettes on the furniture, if they can’t see one.”
Until the last moments, Joyce was demonic, snapping, frantic, possessed by the plan; Ray sulked, disclaiming any involvement in the contemptible female-ordered complexities of socializing with one’s kind. They transformed into their laughing lighthearted social selves at the very stroke of the doorbell announcing the first guests (Zoe and Daniel had for years done clowning imitations of this abrupt about-face). Joyce was suddenly radiant, relaxed, ready for fun, big crescent-shaped pewter and turquoise earrings (to match her turquoise halter-neck top) dangling under her thick red hair that had so many colors in it: pink, red, honey, straw. She glanced offhandedly at the rooms glowing with her labors as if they had arrived in that condition accidentally and somewhat to her surprise. Around Ray’s booming voice, holding forth as he opened bottles, and Joyce’s peals of laughter at someone’s funny story, the party took off.
The girls had to go around filling up glasses; in their giggling retreats to the kitchen for more wine, Zoe explained who people were. Her Aunt Ann was wearing a white Ossie Clark dress with a red rose in her cleavage. Yoyo, an architect, was supposed to be one of Mum’s old boyfriends. Alan Frisch (everybody called him just “Frisch”) was a painter, even weirder than Dad, with bits of straw and stuff stuck onto paint as thick as mud, and Dad was jealous of him. Dud Mason was there with his second wife, very pregnant. The two beautiful young doctors had an “open marriage” and had adopted colored babies. Uncle Martin, Mum’s brother, had brought his latest girlfriend, a Swedish au pair. (Uncle Martin had invented a synthetic fiber that soaked up oil and was trying to sell it to the government to use on spillages from tankers at sea; Mum and Aunt Ann had small prototypes for taking the fat off the top of casseroles.) Dad’s sister Fran had brought the cousins to stay the night, but they were little and had been put to bed.
Later, when everyone had had supper, and all the poised perfection of the house had been sucked down into a vortex of wine and music and smoke and food debris littered everywhere, Zoe and Fiona were probably supposed to go to bed too, but by that time the adults in the house had abdicated all responsibility and no one cared, so they sat side by side on the stairs sharing a bowl of salted peanuts, squeezing apart to make a gap when anyone wanted to go up to the bathroom. They took turns making forays into the lounge, where the party was thickest, pretending to be looking for plates to clear, then reporting back on who was loud, who was happy, who was drunk, who was flirting. Joyce was usually flirting, radiantly and decorously holding off some dedicated man. (“She’s awfull,” deplored Zoe.) Ray would be at the center of whichever knot of debate and dissent was most intense. (“Jesus Christ,” they heard him shouting. “This is the tragedy of art under the later stages of capitalism. Success is failure. Failure is success.”) The guests had been putting on Jefferson Airplane and the Stones and Dory Previn; now Aunt Ann was dancing to “The Age of Aquarius,” absorbed and solitary, weaving her arms around snakily, unpinning one by one the strands of her thick dark hair from where her hairdresser had pinned them up, and letting them fall onto her bare tanned shoulders. Uncle Cliff (who had just done a deal selling luminous paint to slaughterhouses in Sweden) watched over her through his puffing of cigar smoke from the sofa. He was short and plump, with a sprouting mustache and thick hair that looked like a wig although it wasn’t, and he had driven her to the party in his Jaguar.
* * *
When zoe finally left amery-james and went to langham road and was much happier there, she saw even in the first week that Fiona wouldn’t be able to be her friend at school. Just crossing the gap between the schools could not bring her inside Fiona’s world. Even at Langham Road there were gradations and abysses of status and identity, so that Zoe quickly found herself belonging in the set of quiet studious safe ones (though the studying was so easy now that she was usually fairly effortlessly top of the class). Fiona receded ahead of her among the unattainably different bad girls who were glamorous and dangerous, with heavily made-up faces and short skirts and shirts stretched tight to bursting over developed thighs and breasts. Platform heels click-clacking, they yelled and catcalled their way along the school corridors, congregating in the toilets to smoke and do their eyes and sometimes wreak a kind of mayhem of unrolled toilet paper and blocked sinks or a mess of flour and eggs if it was someone’s birthday (the eggs had to be ritually broken on their heads). Fiona, of course, wasn’t one of the rudest or roughest; her appeal as ever was in how she held back with a reserve of watchful fastidious amusement from their excesses.
Some of this crowd Zoe knew from junior school, Jackie Potter and June Fitch
and a few of the boys, although none of them ever acknowledged that they remembered her. (Gary Lyons had been killed with three friends, driving a stolen car.) Most of them were only waiting to leave school at sixteen and find work in shops or offices or garages or at the cigarette factory (whereas Zoe’s new friends had ambitions: not to go to university, perhaps, but to teacher training college or into local government). At Langham Road the teachers often liked the bad ones, even though they were constantly in trouble. Their attention as teachers naturally had to be mostly on the obedient boys and girls who would take and pass examinations, but in truth they couldn’t help looking yearningly across at the wild children, especially those progressive teachers whose ideal was a kind of revolutionary rescue of the disregarded and a redress through art or books or politics of the system that failed them. The men teachers were more flattered by the bad girls’ teasing than by the adulation of the good girls; this contained flirtation was one of the strong dynamics in the school, smoldering and giving off its steady heat.
Fiona was not unfriendly to Zoe at school. She was even in some of her top set classes, because she was good at languages and quick-thinking; but she sat slightly apart like an honored visitor from another tribe, greeting Zoe with a wink or a hand quickly touched onto her shoulder when she passed behind her chair. Zoe was grateful for that much. On one exceptional occasion, they did spend an afternoon together: this was in the fifth year, and they had by this time stopped seeing each other out of school. They were supposed to be doing games, but at Langham Road you could easily avoid this if you wanted to; you could carry tennis rackets, for instance, over to where some group was practicing athletics and look perpetually as if you were on your way somewhere else. (Zoe rejoiced at her escape from the frozen drudgery of the hockey pitch and the vicious competition of the netball court at Amery-James.) It was one of those April days that seem exquisite through windows, with a perfect china-blue sky and bright puffs of white cloud; in fact, a fierce wind had been blowing for hours and she and Fiona shuddered with cold in their thin games blouses and went to find shelter behind the groundsman’s shed at the edge of the field. Scraps of brilliant-green young growth from the trees and bushes growing on the boundary had been torn off by the winds and were heaped up against the shed, an autumn harvest of spring leaves.
