Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

  * * *

  Joyce and ray have been in their new flat for eighteen months. They have the ground floor, the first floor, and the garden of an elegant early Victorian terrace high up in Hilltop (the flats above have separate entrances). There are fine views over the sprawling city: the Georgian terraces strung like precious old necklaces round the hills, the tall glass office blocks, the disused city docks with their warehouses converted into art centers and café bars and riverside apartments. Joyce has had major work to do: she made the kitchen into a studio for Ray and knocked a bedroom and a bathroom together to make a new kitchen on the first floor; then she took out a partition wall at the side of the staircase, restoring the entrance hall to its original proportions, uncovered the old stone flagged floor, and hung the walls all round with paintings and drawings. Of course she and Ray don’t actually do any of this work themselves these days; they have lived in an occasionally taxing intimacy for months with Dean and Alan the builders and Terry the carpenter.

  Joyce snatches a moment while they leave their coats on the bed to show Ann the latest improvement: a third bathroom opening off the master bedroom. Ann (who is doing things to her house too) is almost as interested in all this as Joyce is. They talk about tilers, soil pipes, grouting, and a firm Ann knows of who will renovate old parquet floors. Joyce demonstrates the usefulness of the built-in wardrobes, where their clothes hang in ordered spaces and their shoes are set out in pairs.

  —Ray thinks it’s grotesquely extravagant, she says, but I want to replace the bedroom windows with new identical ones, because these rattle in the wind and keep me awake, and I can have them done in that new burglar-proof glass we’ve already got on the ground floor. He says I’m paranoid.

  Ann attacks Ray’s lack of imagination (she is always in favor of the spending of money). Joyce shows her the loose cover she is making for an armchair, matching the curtains. They would like to linger—there is always more to show and to discuss—but they feel themselves claimed by the murmur of their guests from the next room, their sociability dampened by respect for the occasion. There are some ancient old folk—friends from the church, Dick’s sergeant from the Docks police—who must be put in the comfortable chairs and must not be left without refreshments or without anyone to talk to. The vicar will need buttering up; they wondered why he wanted to come back at all, but it turns out he is an amateur watercolorist and means to bother Ray, which is bound to end badly.

  —When are our children going to start looking after us, instead? Ann wails to Joyce. Aren’t we old and frail enough?

  Ann these days still has her pretty fine-boned face and wrists and ankles, but in between her body has expanded extravagantly. She is using a cane to walk after a fall a few weeks ago (the pressure on those delicate ankles is too much). They visit the kitchen, where Zoe has forgotten to take off the foil and cling film from the plates of food; no wonder no one has started eating. Ann made one of her fruitcakes; Joyce, as well as sandwiches, has made little patties with lemon and cream cheese filling.

  —I did Mum’s proper pastry. The one where you roll it out and dab on bits of fat and then fold and roll twice. Zoe was supposed to put the oven on to warm these up.

  —Life’s too short for dabbing on bits of fat. I use frozen.

  —Vera always notices. She always makes some remark about how you can hardly tell the difference, even when I haven’t mentioned it.

  * * *

  Pearl is in the garden with her cousin leo, peter’s son. they haven’t seen each other for at least two years; this seems so long ago that they feel almost like strangers. They were surely children in that past where they last met; now they both believe they are grown up. He has grown skinny and tall, with dead-straight hair that falls over his eyes, a nervy eagerness that makes her wonder if he’s speeding, and a slight lisp. They are not really cousins; they bicker amiably over just what their relationship is (his grandmother is her great-grandmother’s sister). They have escaped out here to share a joint; Leo has a little packet of skunk in his pocket. (Granny’s cool, Pearl explains, but Grampy’s funny about that stuff.) There is some evidence of last week’s gales; crocuses and daffodils are flattened in the grass, and buds torn off an old blackened dwarf apple tree are silted up on the mossy path. It is cold, but the sun is shining and the sky is clear, pale blue flooding with pink as the afternoon grows late. Far below them they can see the streams of the city’s traffic flow and part and join up again. Buildings are pastel-colored in the light, like cake icing.

  —D’you ever get this weird sensation? Pearl asks him, where you don’t believe that anything is real?

  There is surprising delicate skill in Leo’s big blunt finger ends, crumbling tobacco, shredding the weed with his nail. He has to shake the hair back from his face before he runs his tongue along the edge of the Rizlas.

  —Last night, she goes on, in my old bedroom at my mum’s, I lay there thinking: Why was I me, instead of someone else. You know?

  With the joint wagging unlit in his mouth, he pinches the flesh at the top of her arm between his finger and thumb.

  —You’re real, he says. You’re you. It hurts, doesn’t it?

  —Ow. But why is now real, and not a few minutes ago before you pinched me? Or before Uncle Dick was dead, say? What makes now the only moment that’s real at one time?

  —You should be a philosopher.

  —Sometimes, she says, I do feel there’s a whole world of real things out there, only I can’t get through to them. I’m stuck in the pretend ones.

  —It’s funny to think, he says, that in ten years’ time we’ll both be what we’re going to be.

  —I’ll have been traveling, or I won’t have been. I’ll have gone to university, or I won’t have gone.

  —I’m shit at exams and stuff. Dyslexic. So I won’t have done that.

  —My dad’s training me up to get into Cambridge like training a boxer for a fight. He follows me round the flat, feeding me bits of knowledge, sparring with me, trying to get me into discussing things. But I’m thinking all the time: I might, or I might not. When I split up with my boyfriend, I was in tears, desperate, all the usual stuff. And the other half of me was just watching, thinking, Oh, yes, this is what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to go through this.

  Leo gets out his Zippo lighter (“My dad’s an arse, but he gives good presents”). They smoke and discuss money. Both of them will get a thousand pounds out of what Uncle Dick has left. This is good news for Leo. He has been doing temp work at some place that packages cheap jewelry, spending eight hours a day putting gold chains and earrings onto cards. Now he will be able to give that up and go out to stay with a mate whose brother is doing up a house in France. Pearl doesn’t know what she will do with her money. For the moment she will stay on in Oxford. She certainly doesn’t want to go back to live with her mother again. They aren’t getting on any better.

  Pearl is not working full-time at Virgin any longer; Simon has insisted on her studying with him for her A2 exams. He doesn’t see much of Martha; he dedicates himself to Pearl in a way that half entrances and half frightens her. He will expect too much. She knew he was writing poems on his computer and once when he was out she looked for them and found them. She had expected poems to be confessions—she had hoped she would discover from reading them what her father really thought about her. But although she stared at them over and over, and although the words he used were easy ones (apart from “incarnadine,” which she couldn’t be bothered to look up), they seemed to be written in a code she did not have the information to crack. She had no idea what they were supposed to be about. There were fossils in stones, there were the smoking freezer cabinets in a supermarket, there was a bird painted on a window (or was it meant to have flown into the glass?). Mostly, there weren’t even pictures. She printed the poems out anyway and put them away inside her diary in a drawer, where he wouldn’t look.

  * * *

  When pearl and leo retreat indoors—it�
�s cold, as soon as the sun goes down—Pearl washes up accidentally against her mother.

  —Isn’t that my blouse you’re wearing? Zoe can’t help herself pointing out. I thought I spotted something familiar.

  She means to say this in a tone of fond amusement but knows as soon as the words are beyond recall that they make another link in the heavy chain of things misjudged between them.

  —Jesus, Mum.

  —Oh, we’ve all done that too, says her cousin Sophie quickly. I’m wearing Ma’s black cardigan because I didn’t have one, and Joe had to borrow Dad’s black tie. Anyway, I’m afraid that Pearl looks perfectly lovely in your blouse, Zo.

  They overhear Aunt Vera from behind them.

  —I lost my own little girl, you know, she is saying to someone. My nieces are very good, but it’s not the same.

  (She hardly talked about Kay for forty years. Recently she mentions her often; she grows garrulous and confiding, squeezing hands and brimming easily with tears.)

  Joyce has had two glasses of sherry.

  —I am always dreaming, she says, that I have children in the house again.

  —Auntie Joyce, says Sophie, anytime you want a loan of a houseful of children, please call me.

  —You’d think you’d dream about little ones, but actually my dreams aren’t. They’re adolescents: that phase when they’re impossibly leggy and long and awkward. In the dream I feel so honored, so lucky to have them there. They are so beautiful.

  * * *

  Later, vera is holding forth to a circle of listeners on the subject of Uncle Dick. Sitting crooked but queenly in the tall winged chair Joyce keeps for her beside the fire, she is loud with her old schoolteacherly confident authority.

  —He couldn’t keep his hands to himself, she is saying. He was all over me whenever he had the chance.

  Joyce wonders whether this is indecorous, on the day of the old man’s funeral. At least he is being remembered; at least there’s only family left at the party. Ray luckily can’t hear; he decided to lose the amplifier earlier in order to deter the artistic vicar and now he is listening to Coltrane through a Walkman turned up very high.

  —Mother! Peter booms across the room in his big bass voice. Are you being indiscreet?

  —Am I, dear?

  —I fear it.

  —Dick told me things I never knew about. When he was with his ship in Alexandria, the boys went to some club to see a woman dancing with a lighted cigarette in her wee-wee.

  —In her what, Auntie?

  —And there was me at the time, still thinking babies came out of your tummy button.

  —Did you marry him for love, Vera? Did you love him? Ann asks her.

  Vera shrugs her high arthritic shoulders in the baby-pink cardigan.

  —Six menstruating women sharing one kitchen. Sometimes you couldn’t move for all the rags hanging up to dry. I couldn’t wait to get out.

  —Good God, groans Peter comically. Someone stop her.

  —Why? asked Ann. Isn’t it fascinating?

  Joyce stands up to collect the plates and cups; the intimacy of family is as thick as smoke in the air.

  Pearl sits cross-legged at Aunt Vera’s feet, texting somebody on her mobile.

  Outside the long windows it is almost night; a few rosy clouds lit from below stand out in negative against the gray dark of the sky. Because it has come swiftly, no one has drawn the curtains or switched on the lamps; they sit in the light from the coal-effect gas fire. For hours the children (Sophie’s and her brother’s) have been playing some absorbing game of peril and escape and rescue around the flat, using as props one of Joyce’s polished stone eggs and the mirror from Vera’s handbag and a couple of plastic 007 guns. Under cover of dusk they wriggle on their bellies along the skirtings of the sitting room into the bay, where they plan in whispers together behind a chair, thinking they are invisible to the adults.

  * * *

  Zoe is in the garden. she finds herself wanting a cigarette, even though it’s almost twenty years since she gave up smoking; it would give her a pretext for escaping out here. A lozenge of yellow light from the kitchen window illuminates an array of Joyce’s pots planted up with spring bulbs. Joyce has a gift for making things grow: hopeless-looking bits of twig stuck in among the bulbs are swelling with new buds. Zoe sits in the near-dark on a stone bench to one side of the window. A numb cold seeps into her thighs and into her shoulders resting against the back wall of the tall house, huge blocks of red stone, roughly finished. She hasn’t brought her coat outside; she won’t be able to stay out here for long. She can hear animal rustlings in the garden, birdsong, a distant siren.

  The family gathering is too overwhelming. It isn’t what her mother thinks; it isn’t that Zoe disapproves of them. She only worries that it feels too safe inside. She prefers to sit out here for a while, with her back to them all, so that she can keep watch.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Richard Kerridge and Shelagh Weeks for reading and wise advice, and to Mary Nichols, G. Q. Williams, and Marcia Jennings for explaining things I needed to know. The Welsh Arts Council gave me a generous bursary that gave me a semester’s relief from teaching, and Bath Spa University College have been supportive and encouraging. Thanks to Jennifer Barth, whose interventions have been so creative, and to Joy Harris, Dan Franklin, and Caroline Dawnay.

  ALSO BY TESSA HADLEY

  Accidents in the Home

  EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT. Copyright © 2003 by Tessa Hadley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.

  Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763

  Fax: 212-677-7456

  E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hadley, Tessa.

  Everything will be all right : a novel / Tessa Hadley.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42364-0

  EAN 978-0312-42364-3

  1. Women—England—Fiction. 2. Conflicts of generations—Fiction. 3. Parent and adult child—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.A35E94 2003

  823'.914—dc21

  200304985

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

  First Picador Edition: November 2004

  eISBN 9781466829558

  First eBook edition: September 2012