Read Online Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley - Free Book Online Page B

opening windows, and she often had to improvise a paper fan to cool herself—and also a special encouraging smell, like sharp dried fruit (this was probably something to do with the cigarettes). Joyce knew both these things intimately, from all the childhood nights she’d slept with her mother, when she was ill or had bad dreams. She would have liked to cling to her now, to be consoled.
    â€”I should have gone with her, Lil wailed softly. I should have been there. They don’t know her like I do. There was nothing wrong with her yesterday. It can’t be right.
    Joyce stood awkwardly, not knowing how to help.
    Her strongest feeling in the days that followed was embarrassment, and a suspicious jealousy of this grief, dropped down like an extravagant unwanted drama in their lives, spoiling everything. She didn’t even tell anyone about Kay at the College of Art, which she had begun attending that October. When she had to take a day off to go to the funeral, she simply said it was “a relative,” so they all assumed it was someone old and unimportant; and the next morning she was back drinking coffee in a noisy, smoking, joking crowd in the Gardenia Café as if nothing had happened. Pictures of the scene rose in her mind: the small coffin, the stricken adults, Uncle Dick cupping his hand around his eyes to hide his weeping, the dismal Far-mouth cemetery tucked at the end of a raw road that wound past the bonded warehouses from behind the customs offices. She forced them back down again. These two possibilities must be held apart if she was to hang on to this new joyous life where she at last belonged.
    *   *   *
    For a week after Kay’s funeral, Vera stayed in her bed. The house was in disarray, the washing wasn’t done, there were no proper meals, the children when they got home from school didn’t change out of their uniforms but sat bickering or pretending to work or play battleships at the table while they listened to the noisy grieving of the two women or the quarreling between Aunt Vera and Uncle Dick. All the doors were left open and nobody tried to hide anything from them; this in itself was frightening. When a confused winter bird got in the house and flew around crashing into the windows, it only seemed like a part of the craziness that had broken in. Guiltily Joyce tried to organize a few things. She brought home potatoes and meat from town and tried to cook stew, only she didn’t know that it took hours for the meat to be tender, so they all sat round the table chewing and then leaving little parcels of pale chewed-up meat around the edges of their plates.
    The other children were humbled to discover that Kay, who had been such an ordinary part of their lives and hadn’t ever been much fussed over, could produce such extravagant adult effects. When Vera was crying Peter slammed the door and sat with his fists in his ears (it was a dreadful crying, in a voice of hers they didn’t know, deep and cowlike). One evening Vera came down into the kitchen in her dressing gown with her hair wild and told Lil that she had seen a blue light hovering in her room and had seemed to feel the weight of a child laid in the bed beside her.
    â€”You know about this stuff. I suppose you’ll say it was some sort of sign.
    â€”I wish she would come to me, said Lil dully. I can’t feel anything.
    â€”Is that the next thing? asked Vera. Am I going to go mad? Am I going to start seeing visions and believing in spirits?
    Then on the morning she was supposed to return to Amery-James she got up early and washed and dressed in her gray suit absolutely as usual, and pinned up her hair without a word, her brown complexion bleached, her lips pale, her eyes looking swimming and full not because she was weeping but because of how the flesh had fallen away from her face. Ann reported that at school the girls were frightened to do the least thing in lessons to cross her;