Everything Will Be All Right (11 page)

Farmer Brookes carried Gus off through the orchard in the morning sunshine, holding him around the middle; Gus opened his wings so that it looked as though the farmer as he walked was wrestling with an angel. Ann wouldn't watch him go; she sank down on the doorstep with her head buried in her arms in grief. They told the Brookeses to eat the goose themselves.

*   *   *

When joyce came back from paris, she caught the last bus out of the city to the docks; she had arranged to telephone from the Docks Police Station for Vera to come and pick her up in the car. The bus was crowded. A horrible old sailor with gray stubbly cheeks and breath that reeked of drink fell asleep beside her, and his head rolled onto her shoulder so many times that she gave up trying to push him off. She concentrated all her efforts on keeping Paris intact inside her—coffee and bread and Dior and wine and a little restaurant with red-checked tablecloths on the Boul' Mich—so as not to lose one precious drop in collision with the ugly things of home. She had felt instantly, intimately, that she belonged to Paris; miraculously, she had seemed to understand what the Parisians said to her, far beyond the reach of her schoolgirl French. When the bus stopped and all the passengers shuffled up to get off, she realized with a shock that Daphne had been sitting all the time only a couple of seats behind her. Joyce had to pull down her heavy suitcase from the rack; she was hotly aware of the other girl watching her struggle, but they didn't smile or even look at each other.

As Joyce carried her suitcase the fifty yards in the dark to the dock gates, Daphne came up swiftly behind her on her bike, which she must have left locked up somewhere near the bus stop. Joyce heard the whirring of her wheels and smelled Chypre de Coty.

—Bong-jooer. Had a nice time in old gay Paree?

—Yes, thank you, said Joyce.

Daphne was wobbling on the bike, weaving the handlebars to keep pace with Joyce's walking.

—Where's Gilbert? she asked.

—I don't know. He went away, I think.

Daphne described a wide arc, then came alongside Joyce again.

—One sandwich short of a picnic, if you ask me. Something funny about him.

Joyce changed hands on her suitcase.

—Don't you think?

—I'm afraid I have to go in here, said Joyce, to use the telephone.

Daphne grinned incredulously through the gates at the police station; possibly she thought Joyce was so frightened of her that she was going to take refuge with the law.

—Oh, well, she said, if you see him, tell him
au revoyer
from me. Tell him he's a naughty boy, leaving my uncle in the lurch.

She cycled off under the streetlamps, making the bike dance in wide curves from one side of the road to the other, sitting back on the saddle with her hands in the pockets of her short jacket.

*   *   *

They found out that gilbert had hitched his way up north to see his mother; their sister Selina, whose husband played the clarinet at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, gave him some money. After that there was no news from him for years. He left the model Hurricane with half a fuselage and one wing; Martin tried to finish it but in the end had to resign himself to building a crash scene around it, using artificial grass from the greengrocer's and making ruined buildings out of papier-mâché, decorating them with German shop signs and a Nazi flag.

Someone explained to Joyce much later—at a time when all the old methods of treating psychiatric patients were coming into disrepute and everybody was reading R. D. Laing—what the insulin treatment actually consisted of. Patients fasted for fourteen hours and then were put into a rubber sided bed, as a protection against the convulsions produced by the drug; an insulin coma was deliberately induced, and then the patient had to be revived by counteractive injections into the vein. These didn't always work; sometimes there was an unseemly struggle round the bed, bringing the patient back to consciousness. Joyce told admiringly then the story of her aunt's rescue; she didn't confess how fervently at the time she had wished Gilbert back where he came from, and how sometimes even now she looked and didn't look for him with guilty dread in the faces of the beggars and winos who passed her in the street.

Lil became convinced Gilbert had joined up and fought in Korea and died there. She said she'd seen him once at a séance; she spoke about it in the special voice she used for the transcendent: stubborn and emotionally uplifted.

—He was in uniform. He was all bloody. But he was very calm, and smiling. He came to tell us that he was finally at peace.

This voice particularly irritated Vera.

—It's enough to make anyone despair, said Vera. How can you be comforted by something that didn't happen? You don't seem able to distinguish between dreams and real things.

Vera at that time was clearing out cupboards in the old house, throwing away the accumulated rubbish of their life there with ruthlessness and zeal. She and Peter were going to move into a flat near Amery-James; she was going to start divorce proceedings against Uncle Dick.

—Peace! she exclaimed. What kind of travesty is that? Peace through war. Is that the best solution you can come up with?

Three

Ray and Iris Deare were one of the couples everyone wanted to know. They were both painters. As soon as Ray finished studying Fine Art at the college he had been invited to join the teaching staff; he taught drawing to Joyce in her second year. She was terrified of him, always imagining how impatient he must feel at having to be bothered with her flawed work. There were others in the class, talented and confident, with whom Ray carried on a dialogue she greedily listened in on and soaked up: Cézanne's
petite sensation,
the difference between Picasso's and Braque's Cubist experiments, the importance of the spaces between the shapes, the need for a pencil no harder than HB and no softer than B, Degas's lithographs of prostitutes. The first time she heard her teacher use the word “prostitute” casually, as if it was just another fact in the world, Joyce felt something crumble in the pit of her stomach, choking and intoxicating her.

Ray hardly ever spoke to her directly, even when sometimes he reached across her shoulder to change something in her drawing, so that his tweedy rough sleeve was against her cheek for a few moments and she could smell his cold pipe in his pocket. He was untidy, shortish, with a crumpled lyrical face and brown curly hair; his wet brown eyes might have been doglike, pleading and needy, except that they were always veiled with irony and jokes.

—Miss Stevenson, he said to her once, you're not looking. You're only drawing what you think is there. Don't think. You have to learn to be stupid in order to draw.

Joyce didn't mind. She knew what he meant. She liked the invitation to be stupid. She practiced losing herself in the quiet of the life room, where the intent soft patter of pencils and charcoal was necessary and soothing as breathing. If anyone spoke, it woke her as if from a dream.

Iris Deare was training to be a primary school teacher. In the beginning it was Iris whom Joyce was in love with, at least as much as Ray. It was Iris who invited her round to visit them at their flat perched high on the first floor of one of the old steep Georgian terraces that overhung the river in Hilltop. In the sitting room—the lounge, Joyce learned to call it—there were three floor-length sash windows. Joyce had never seen anything like this room before; it was an inspiration. The floorboards were painted black, the walls were gray and hung with paintings and drawings and prints wherever there was space; nothing in the room was there because it was useful but only if it was interesting or beautiful. A huge old antique chaise longue stood along the back wall, its leather ripped and its horsehair stuffing leaking out; it was heaped with cushions, embroidered oriental ones and homemade ones covered in Liberty fabrics or batik prints Iris had done herself. In one corner of the room stood an old rocking horse with its paint washed off and its mane and tail worn down to stubble: Iris had found it put out with the rubbish in the street.

—Poor old love, she said crooningly, rubbing the horse's stubble with her cheek, kissing his flaring nostrils that had once been brilliant red,
we
think he's a magnificent charger still, don't we?

One end of the long room, beyond a sagging screen of carved oriental wood, was given over to be Ray's studio. The flat always smelled of paint and turps. There were no curtains at any of the windows: Joyce couldn't imagine how that felt, never being able to close yourself off from being seen.

—Why would you want to shut that out? Iris asked reasonably, gesturing to the view of pale tiered wedding-cake terraces, steeply dropping woods, the twisting ribbon of the river, the cranes of the city docks (neglected because most of the traffic had gone to the port at the river's mouth where Joyce's uncle worked). Beyond the river, spreading to the hills in the distance, the flat plain was built up with Victorian terraces, warehouses, and the sprawling tobacco factory. It was scarred with ruined churches and waste plots where the bombs had fallen.

Iris made coffee in a little metal pot that sat on the gas ring, real coffee, which Joyce had only ever tasted in France. It was bitter and thick, not like she remembered it, but she swallowed it down as best she could, eagerly, like an initiation.

—Look, Ray, said Iris, isn't she just one of those Epstein bronze heads?

Ray was stretched out on the chaise longue reading the newspaper with his shoes off, bright yellow socks showing a hole. Iris swept Joyce's hair up and held it in a twisted knot on top of her head; she took Joyce's chin in her fingers and pushed her face round to present her profile. Iris's hands were very fine-boned, like all of her; she was dark and tiny with a miniature perfection Joyce yearned for: creamy pale skin, high cheekbones, slanting interrogative eyebrows, a tense high rib cage, a long swinging rope of dark hair down her back. She smelled of the unusual French soap she used, made with honey and almonds; her nails were perfectly shaped and painted a dark crimson like her lipstick. Her slender fingers were weighted down with huge exotic rings she'd found for next to nothing in junk shops. Joyce knew she would have passed over these rings if she'd been looking, thinking they were brash and cheap, not seeing how clever and striking they could be if you knew how to carry them off.

Ray bestowed a cursory glance on Joyce, Iris holding her still for him to see; he grunted something that might have been an indifferent assent. She was embarrassed. She didn't want him to think she was pushing herself on his attention.

—It's your wonderful chunky squareness, said Iris. You should wear your hair like this. And some huge primitive earrings, like an Easter Island statue.

Gently, not wanting to offend her friend, Joyce pulled away her head and shook out her hair, blushing.

—I couldn't get away with it, she said. I'm not beautiful like you.

Ray grunted again.

Joyce did begin to grow her hair, though, so she could wear it in a swinging rope.

*   *   *

Because ray had so recently been a student himself (he was only five or six years older than Joyce), he mixed with the students as much as with the other teaching staff. The crowd around him and Iris gathered at the Gardenia Café, or at the Friday jazz club, held on a disused floor of one of the old tobacco warehouses, or at one another's flats and houses for parties. In fine weather, in their breaks, they draped themselves around the statuary of the Empire fountain opposite the entrance to the college: there were photographs of them disporting among the sea folk, someone astride a mermaid's tail, a face with puffed cheeks pretending to blow a Triton's trumpet, hands squeezing a pair of verdigris-green bronze breasts. The men in the crowd were noisier and more argumentative than the girls. They were older, many of them had already done their two years' National Service; the girls mostly deferred to them. And there were more of them, of course. Passionate discussions raged, always through a thick cloud of cigarette and pipe smoke: over art, over jazz, over privilege and class. At that time in the mid-fifties all the men wanted to be working class; they argued over whose parents were most authentically proletarian. Ray Deare's father was a traveling representative for the Co-op; Dud Mason's worked in a local print shop; Pete Smith's had been a milkman but now worked in an office for General Electric. Stefan Jeremy kept quiet; everyone knew his father was a partner in a London firm of architects.

The men leaped up shouting in the Gardenia sometimes, when the argument got too heated, and threw back their chairs and were asked to leave by the waitresses. Some of these waitresses, the attractive ones, would even be invited into the arguments to adjudicate. Dud Mason, big and bear-shaped, untidy curls pushed behind surprisingly tiny ears, would call them over to decide whether there was any point in figurative art any longer. Or Yoyo Myers, who was short and springy, with a face as pretty as a girl's, and played the tea-chest bass in a skiffle band, would ask them whether they liked, really honestly liked, the sound of modern jazz. Some of the waitresses were students at the art college or the university; some reappeared later in the crowd as girlfriends of the very men they had had to ask to leave.

Joyce could have told everybody that her father had worked as a lowly porter on the railways, but the girls didn't seem quite as keen to own up to their working-class roots. Everyone had their idea of a rough-hewn male hero with cap and muffler and coat collar turned up (men at the art college turned their collars up), but there didn't seem to be any glamorous aura attached to his female equivalent. The right match for the rough-hewn male was a soignée and worldly-wise female (who would perhaps tactfully temper his passions and smooth his rough edges). Lenny Barnes, for instance, made no efforts to cover up the fact that she'd been to finishing school in Switzerland. It was all a scream and ridiculously silly; she told stories about how they walked around with books on their heads and practiced getting out of cars. There was actually a false car seat and a false door for them to practice with.