Everything Will Be All Right (14 page)

—My cold friend, said Iris, pressing her face and hands against the glass, come to watch but won't come in. Hello, old friend! Are you lonely tonight?

Ray got out his pipe and smoked it, in spite of his turban. He even kept it in his mouth while he danced. Someone said he looked like Sherlock Holmes in disguise as a Lascar.

—A Lascar! said Lenny. Oh, I want to be a Lascar. What's a Lascar?

Ray danced strenuously, hopping about and jerking his head from side to side, not perfectly in rhythm. He didn't like trad jazz, he preferred contemporary. Joyce was shocked at his jogging about so willingly in his turban, his eyes shining weirdly against the dark skin. She might have been disappointed that he hadn't remained loftily apart, but instead she felt a secret exhilaration, like an inward disrespectful joke, at being unbound from some of her awe of him. Even when he and Pete Smith were ranting about Munnings and the Royal Academy, she had to swallow an exultant laughter at his mouth saying such serious things under his ridiculously waggling false mustache.

At the end of the evening, the Deares invited everyone back to their flat for coffee. Iris had already said that Joyce could stay in the spare room. When they got outside—the moon was higher in the sky and farther off by this time, silvery cool—Joyce knew she was drunk, with the wonderful kind of drunkenness where you progress along like a dodgem car by bumping into things and people and spinning forward, but there is never any chance of hurting anybody or falling over. She took to tickling the others on their necks with the end of her tail. This seemed a perfect satisfying expression of her tenderness for them all; eventually Dud Mason caught hold of her by the tail and pulled it off and wouldn't give it back to her although she meowed piteously for it. (Dud was in a toga.) It was fun to be awake and alive and noisy in wet warm Hilltop, in all the rich green exhalations of the gardens, while behind the windows of the tall houses all the stuffy people lay sleeping. There had been a shower of rain while they were at the ball, and the roads and garden walls shone wet in the streetlights.

When they got into the flat, Dud said he was so hungry he could eat the rocking horse—he began, indeed, to gnaw on it—and then suddenly everyone was starving, and Iris and Joyce were making toast and frying eggs in the kitchen: extraordinary eggs, which no sooner broke and were in the pan than they were cooked, so that even while they were dishing them up and handing them out (Joyce still with her cat gloves on) the girls were calling everyone to come and look at the extraordinary miraculous eggs that cooked in an instant. The eggs, taken into the lounge and eaten with salt and dry toast, seemed delicious.

—Your friend's out there again, said Joyce. She meant the moon; it was pressed onto the night outside the long lounge window like a bright sixpence.

Iris was startled and stared fearfully, as if she expected to see someone standing brooding on the balcony in the dark. After that she subsided into herself and sat wrapped tightly in her sari on the floor, the skin of her face marked purple with tiredness under the eyes and around the fine nostrils. Ray brought out a bottle of whisky. Joyce drank some out of the bathroom tooth mug that was the best he could do for a whisky glass (the others had eggcups and plastic picnic beakers). She had rubbed off her black nose and whiskers with Iris's cold cream, and then washed her face in the bleak bathroom down half a flight of stairs, which the Deares shared with other tenants. Now she sat with her knees tucked under her among the cushions on the chaise longue and felt the men in the room orbit deliciously around her. Dud Mason, who was older and a third-year and so melancholy-funny, had coiled her cat tail up as a pillow under his cheek. He needed consoling for his poor foot, run over by a tank on D-Day, which made him hobble crookedly and for his toga that made him look so foolish. Yoyo was plucking an imaginary bass for her benefit, to the Modern Jazz Quartet playing “Skating in Central Park” on Ray's portable record player. Pete Smith, hunkered in a corner, was out of the reach of her charm, but then she didn't find him good-looking anyway. Gillian Corbin and Mary Anderson were eclipsed: Mary was asleep among the cushions (and anyway, although she was the best painter out of all the girls, she had buck teeth and thick pebble glasses); Gillian was waiting for a taxi to take her home.

Ray and Pete were arguing about Giacometti, and then about socialism, and then about primitive art. Ray still had his brown face but he had taken off his turban and his mustache. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back to the rows of Penguin and Pelican paperbacks on bookshelves made of painted planks and bricks. Sometimes he waved his pipe dramatically in the air as if he were drawing things; sometimes he closed his eyes, sucking on it. Joyce remembered that he was only twenty-five or -six; when he was teaching she always thought of him as immeasurably older than herself. His eyelids were deep and fine-skinned, crinkled; the flesh on his face was soft and thick; his mouth was red, with a lower lip so swollen it looked as if he had been stung. Someone had said that with his curls and that soft mouth he looked like a cross baby. He was always completely absorbed in whatever one thing he was doing: pouring whisky, constructing an argument, painting. If he tried, say, to pour coffee and talk at the same time, then Iris had to unpick the coffeepot apologetically out of his hands before it got cold.

—What we have to do, he was shouting, is get right up close to Africa. You know, like getting up close to one of those totem figures, one of those really tall ones, with teeth and eyes and bits of hide and bone. We've got to frighten ourselves, that's the truth. All the old taboos, all the old forbidden things. You've got to cut through all these layers of fuss, of baby clothes, and all this
stuffing,
all this stuffy upholstered old Europe with its taboos and its dead skin.

—And what about the Empire? Pete shouted back. What about what's happening in Kenya? What kind of a civilization is that?

—That's exactly it, that's exactly it, said Ray, that's exactly what I'm trying to say.

—You're not making any sense at all. Joyce laughed at them.

—We are, Pete said indignantly. You just don't properly understand what it is we're talking about.

When Gillian and Mary had left in their taxi, Iris stood up and said she was going to bed. Joyce thought that she had better go to bed too, although she didn't really want to; she felt her energy was inexhaustible and she was sure she would lie awake listening to the talk through the wall. The men were passing the whisky round and changing the record. (—You've got to hear this, Ray said. This is raw jazz, really raw, really down to the bone, nothing pretty about this.) It would seem presumptuous to stay up without Iris and be the only girl.

The bed in the spare room was left as it must have been when Ray last slept in there. Joyce assured Iris that she didn't mind not having clean sheets; it had clearly not occurred to Iris that anyone might. Her face was dislocated by a yawn so deep she hardly seemed to hear Joyce saying good night. Joyce undressed, listening to the music and the rumbling of voices through the wall. She had brought her pajamas and her toothbrush in a bag; when she had taken off all her things (thinking that it was the second time she had been naked in this room), she realized she had left the bag in the lounge but it didn't matter. It wasn't cold. She climbed in between the sheets in her bare skin and must have fallen asleep as soon as she put her head on the pillow.

*   *   *

When she woke up she had no idea how long she had been in there or how many hours the others had gone on talking; the lounge was silent now and the flat was dark. What she knew was that someone was in bed with her: a naked man. She could feel him bulky and hot and soft beside her; she could smell him, a spicy mix of sweat and spirits and smoke and something personal, a green smell like cut grass. She was sure the man was asleep because he was breathing through his mouth, heavily, in a broken snorting pattern; he must be lying on his back. She too was on her back. She had no idea how long he might have been there. In her dreams, perhaps, she had been aware of an arrival, of a stirring of accommodation to another presence. In her dreams she must have let him climb in, as if this were something understood between them. It was his snorting breath that had waked her.

It was so dark she could not see anything, not her own hand in front of her eyes, let alone the face of the man whose heat was radiating against her where her thigh touched his. And yet, in spite of the dark, in truth she knew immediately who he was. (It was not only her thigh that touched him. She could feel under the toes of her left foot the hairy calf of his right leg, and his right arm was thrown heavily, carelessly, across her belly, palm up. Vividly, too, she was aware of them circulating the same air in their noisy breathing; she could taste the whisky in it.) It would have made perfect sense for it to be Yoyo; although it wasn't supposed to be common knowledge that they had slept together, he might have been tempted by such a lucky opportunity as this, might have pretended to settle down on the floor in the lounge and then crept into her room later. But Yoyo would surely have wakened her. And anyway, she never for one moment thought it was Yoyo, whose presence in a bed was light and neat as a boy's. She put her hand to where this man's head should be on the pillow and felt curls, damp and short, and then with her fingers felt bits of a face, incomprehensible in its arrangements in the pitch dark but known to her, known vividly.

She leaped up into a sitting position, pulling away from where she touched against him as if she was burned.

—Mr. Deare, she hissed, Mr. Deare! Wake up! You've made a terrible mistake. You've come to the wrong bed. I'm in here.

For a long moment there was no response, only a whistling exhalation on a different prolonged note. Then the snoring broke off and he also sat up abruptly in alarm; he grabbed her painfully tightly by the shoulders, as if she needed protecting from something, or he did.

—Who are you? he whispered urgently into the dark.

—It's Joyce, she said, Joyce Stevenson.

—And what am I doing in here?

—I think you made a mistake. You came to bed, and you forgot that Iris said I could stay the night.

—Jesus Christ. I wasn't asleep?

—You were. You must have gone right off to sleep. Then I woke up.

—Jesus Christ.

It was so strange that they couldn't see each other, although he held her tightly in his hands for these few minutes while they spoke. He groaned, a groan out of all proportion to what had happened: as if he confronted a wholesale indictment of his irresponsibility, his drunkenness, his insensitivity.

—I'm such an idiot, he urgently whispered at her.

—No, not at all, it was an easy mistake to make; it doesn't matter.

—It does, it does, he hissed, insisting. What should I do now?

—Just go back to your own bed. There's no need for us to mention anything to Iris. There's nothing to mention.

—All right, he said, are you sure?

—Of course I'm sure. Nothing's happened.

—All right. If you're quite sure.

As he let go of her and moved to feel his way out of the bed, his right hand fell from her shoulder—palm open, hot and damp from where he had gripped her—and brushed quickly across her breasts, so quickly she couldn't be sure whether it was an accident or not.

—Good night then, she said into the dark. Don't worry about it.

—You're very good to make no fuss. I hope I've got all my clothes.

—If there's anything here in the morning I'll put it out on the landing.

—I suppose this is all really very funny.

—It is, she whispered firmly. It's terribly funny.

When he had gone she lay awake, parched and nauseated with hangover, feverish with consciousness of what had happened. She had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet she felt that something precious had been spoiled; she wished she never had to see Ray Deare again. She also wished she dared to slip into the lounge and fetch her pajamas out of her bag, so she could cover herself up; her naked breasts felt hot and heavy and she ached from imagining, over and over, although she forbade herself, his hand across her front.

*   *   *

The next day, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, someone rang the doorbell of the Stevenson flat in Benteaston.

They were all at home. Lil and Joyce and Ann were washing up Sunday dinner. Martin was excused from washing up in return for polishing shoes; he had these spread out on sheets of newspaper in the middle of the carpet in the front room and put on a great appearance of rubbing and buffing every time one of them came through, although it was obvious he was mostly engaged in reading all the articles in the paper. He read things out to them from time to time.

—Listen to this. “House painter hypnotizes woman while her teeth are extracted.”

Lil, who had read the paper through already that morning, obliged by exclaiming in astonished sympathy.

—“Widow leaves six thousand pounds, car, house, and wines to chauffeur.” “Man digging in garden finds unexploded bomb.”

Ann and Joyce ignored him. They got through the mountain of dirty dishes and pans in a trance of uncommunicative efficiency, only scowling if they bumped up against each other in the cramped little kitchen while they were putting things away. It was Joyce who hung her soggy tea towel over her shoulder and went to see who was at the door. Sometimes some of her college friends came over on Sunday afternoons to take her out for a walk on the heath.

Ray Deare stood on the path, hangdog and miserable, with his shoulders hunched up and his hands thrust into the pockets of his tweed jacket. Joyce hadn't seen him again since she'd found him in her bed; she had slipped out of the Deares' flat early in the morning before anyone was up. There were traces of brown makeup in front of Ray's ears and in his eyebrows. It was a muffled gray day, cool for summer, very still. In the tiny paved front garden the blooms on the aged pink standard rose that Lil had tried to prune into shape sagged gloomily earthward, turning brown before they'd opened.