Everything Will Be All Right (16 page)

The hall was dim, the blinds were drawn; spilled drops of sapphire and ruby glowed on the tiled floor where light came through the stained glass in the porch. With Timmy the cat winding under his feet, Ray led her through a dining room with a tall wooden over-mantel and a ticking clock and brass fire irons; pools of pale light were collected on the high-polished table and sideboard. There were dark squares and rectangles of paintings hung by chains from the picture rail, but Joyce knew without looking that they weren't Ray's or anything remotely like Ray's; they were cows wading in brooks rusty with sunset light or yearning shepherdesses on the moors. It wasn't quite like anywhere that Joyce herself had ever lived: more—much more—comfortably furnished and prosperous than anything Lil had ever been able to afford; not as eccentric and distinguished and ramshackle as the old house in the estuary; more old-fashioned than Aunt Vera's bright flat with its pale blue Formica kitchen. She watched Ray hunting in a cupboard in the breakfast room for a plate to put the cat's scraps on. He was still mysterious, the artist with the gift of knowledge. But he was also, after all, just the boy who had grown up in this house, and played with his sister under the shelter, and knew where the forks were kept and where the matches were, and had been given, like her own brother, a printing set or a penknife for Christmas. (He showed her afterward where he had in fact tried out his new penknife, years before, on the arm of his mother's leather-covered chair.) This vision of his familiarity, like a vision of their closeness to come, was more shocking to her, more absolutely a revolution in her apprehension of everything, than even the flame of excitement as she waited for him to take her upstairs and make love to her.

—I do know you, she said into his neck, wrapping herself about him from behind while he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. I do know who you are.

—I know you do, said Ray, that's why I've chosen you.

—Sometimes you'll wish I didn't. You'll wish I was someone more remote and lofty minded.

—At this moment, he said, I can't contemplate it. Not with you pressed up against me like that.

He brought sheets, and they lay down under a green silk eiderdown in his old room, which was papered with a pattern of green trellis hung with baskets of flowers. Joyce said she would launder the sheets and iron them before his mother came back. Probably it was strange for him, this bringing her here to his childhood bedroom; he was more shy and self-doubting than she had imagined, after all his talk. They didn't put on any lights or draw the curtains, in case the neighbors saw. Ray brought in a portable enamel paraffin stove; as the hours passed and it grew dark outside, an image of the pattern of diamonds cut in the top of the stove was cast tremblingly onto the slanting ceiling.

*   *   *

Joyce changed her mind, later, about iris's paintings. years later she bought one of Iris's small oils that she saw in an exhibition of local artists. This was when all the turmoil was behind them, all the shouting and weeping and shamed relatives and clumsy ugly self-justification; they had arrived by then at a point where she and Iris could even occasionally meet at the same parties, although they ignored each other. Iris was painting under her maiden name, Iris Neave, although she did remarry (she never had children). She must have recovered from the crisis of confidence in her work that she had once spoken of to Joyce.

The painting was of a little cream jug and a spoon on a white tray cloth edged with lace. It was curious how Iris, who was no good with real food or hospitality (Joyce was the one who turned out to be good at these things), should choose so consistently to paint domestic objects: fruit and cakes and labeled jars of jam; teapots and sugar tongs and plates of nuts and cheese.

—Dainty, said Ray, so dainty it makes me want to smash something. How can she still want to paint as if the world hasn't changed? Tray cloth indeed! Who uses a tray cloth these days? It's too pretty; don't you think it's saccharine and mendacious? (It was he who seemed to have clung on longer to the need to justify himself: he wasn't ever very nice about Iris.)

But Joyce didn't think so, although she didn't try to explain and didn't really even examine for herself what it was she liked about the picture. If she happened to glance at it, it was a soothing still point in her busy days. She liked the careful continence of the brushstrokes. She liked its irony (Iris surely knew the tray cloth was old-fashioned?). She liked the idea that the cream was held there inside the jug and never poured.

Four

It had been going to be such a lovely Saturday.

Full, and busy, but Joyce didn't mind that. In the morning, while Daniel had his nap and Zoe played, she made the chocolate cream pudding from a Len Deighton recipe cut out from the newspaper: cream, eggs, sugar, butter, brandy, chocolate. The family had been eating meanly for a week—beans on toast, tomatoes on toast, plates of cheese and lettuce for her—so that she could splash out on this dinner party. She stuck sponge finger biscuits like a palisade all around the cut glass bowl Lil had given her, then poured the chocolate mixture into the middle and put it in the fridge to set. She impressed herself by resisting the temptation to taste any or scrape out the bowl and as a consequence felt gratifyingly hollowly thin.

When she had washed up the cooking things, she had time to sit down at the table and drink a black instant coffee while Zoe had squash and biscuits. Zoe—a steady shy four-year-old, with light brown hair cut short like a boy's—was taking advantage of Daniel's being out of the way to fill in her magic coloring book; you brushed the drawings with plain water and like a miracle colors sprang out from the page. She worked painstakingly and neatly, her tongue stuck out in concentration, on a panting dog with its head cocked winningly sideways, boys playing ball in a suburban garden, a little girl in a maid's apron and cap. Ray had groaned in real pain when Zoe first brought the coloring book home (his mother had bought it for her); he threatened to throw it out, but Joyce understood the appeal of these happy obedient pictures and had signaled frowningly to him not to make a fuss. Anyway, Ray had soon forgotten about the book's existence.

Yesterday Joyce had dusted and vacuumed and washed floors until she was sweating and gritty with dirt. Today, for the first time in weeks, the sun shone into their basement flat: a weak sweet early spring sunshine that fingered its exposure into some forgotten corners and found out cobwebs, so that she had to get her duster out again. She didn't mind the excuse for gazing critically around her. The rooms awaited company like a stage set: centered on the distinction and seriousness of Ray's paintings, glowing with the careful thought and tending she had put into all that surrounded the paintings, the tasteful and original furniture and ornaments. She was full (it had turned out) of ingenuity and practical resourcefulness: she knew how to make their flat look modern and stylish even on Ray's meager income (he was only working part-time at the college and hadn't sold much work this past couple of years). She had rescued some dainty kitchen chairs someone had put out for a Guy Fawkes night bonfire and painted them with black enamel. She had had flat squares of foam cut and covered them in thick colored cottons, orange and olive green and mustard yellow, then piled them up in a block. She spread tall grasses and flower heads out to dry on newspapers above the immersion heater in the airing cupboard and arranged them in two old earthenware tobacco jars she had bought in a junk shop for a shilling. The look she went for was contemporary Scandinavian, earth colors and clean shapes: a black wrought-iron candelabrum, stainless steel cutlery, coarse-woven linen place mats.

The plan was that when Daniel woke up she would take him and Zoe round to her mother's. Lil still lived at the same flat in Benteaston, along with Martin, who was studying for his doctorate in chemistry and working as a laborer building the new bypass. There Aunt Vera would look after them until Lil finished work at the cake shop. Aunt Vera did have grandchildren of her own, but they were in America, so she yearned for a share in Joyce's. She was not exactly a natural with small children. Daniel and Zoe preferred Grandma Lil, who would greet them with bags of leftover cakes and arms open wide, shouting, “Who's my bestest bestest girl (or boy) in all the world, then?” But they tolerated Vera and her shy stiff efforts to be strict with them and to encourage Zoe's reading and get Daniel to talk. (She reproached Lil for using baby language with him, insisting that this would “hold him up”; Lil took no notice.)

When she had left the children, Joyce had an appointment at the hairdresser's; after that she would come back to the flat by herself and get on with cooking the fiddly beef olives she was doing for the main course. The little packages of thinly sliced beef spread with mushroom stuffing had to be tied with threads individually before they were sautéed. She had made the chicken liver terrine for the first course the night before. Ray would pick the children up on his way back from the college, and there would be plenty of time to get them into bed and asleep before the guests arrived. Joyce already knew what she was going to wear: she had made herself a new low-cut dress from a piece of gray slubbed silk left over from the days of the dressmaking business she had before the children came along. It had a difficult deep cowl neckline, three-quarter-length sleeves, and a peg skirt: she had bought a narrow black patent belt to wear with it. It was hanging now against the wardrobe in the bedroom, with a piece of tissue paper round the neck to protect it from dust, ready to put on after her quick last-minute bath. She could already imagine herself, moving suavely in the sexy top-heavy way forced by the shape of the skirt, wafting perfume, welcoming the guests into the rooms, enticingly lit by well-placed lamps and rich with the smells of the food cooking. Miles Davis would be weaving his spell from the record player.

Of course it would be up to Ray what record he put on. Sometimes he didn't choose the kind of thing that Joyce wanted; if he was in a certain mood he might put on very far-out noisy fast jazz that nobody else really liked. But there was no point in worrying now about what his mood would be, at a point when there was nothing she could do about it.

*   *   *

The first thing that went wrong was that when she had got together a bag with all the things the children might need in the afternoon and was just about to put their coats on and fasten Daniel in the push chair, the front doorbell rang and Ann was standing there with a girlfriend.

Ann hadn't really settled to anything since she finished at the university (she hadn't done well in her exams; she had had a wild time instead and been the first person in town—by her own account—to wear black slacks so tight-fitting that they had to be zipped up the inside leg). At twenty-six she had been engaged twice and twice broken it off: one had been unsuitably too nice and one unthinkably too nasty (not that that would have stopped her in itself, but it turned out he had been living, all the time they were engaged, with some woman who even had a child by him). She had worked in a shoe shop, and as a nanny for some “ghastly” children, and currently had a job as a waitress at the cafeteria in the zoo. Her latest boyfriend had made Joyce's heart stop cold in her chest when he was first introduced: he was a gray-faced ratty little man who wore a Teddy-boy draped suit and worked at a bookie's. Luckily he didn't seem to be as keen as Ann, and she made all the running, lurking about waiting to catch him as he came out of work, traipsing round the pubs to find where he might be drinking.

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?